Bloodshift

by Garfield Reeves-Stevens

  Adrienne limped to the collapsed metal and canvas confusion of the back of the truck. The bodies were hopelessly twisted, limbs bent in ways that nature did not allow. To her horror, she realised she was glad that her charges were dead. Glad that her duty would not force her to stay with them, until the enemy arrived and she was taken. With her soldiers dead she was free to save herself. She cried as she ran into the trees by the road, the rumbling of the panzers growing louder in her ears. She was glad they were dead and felt shame in her eagerness to live.

  The sun was blood red and setting, swollen and rippling on the horizon behind the farmhouse in the small, barren field.

  She could hear soldiers shouting to each other in the woods. Were they following a trail she had trampled through the forest or were they just scouting, hoping for a prize such as her?

  She ran for the farmhouse. Straight across the field. She had never been given the training to be aware of the target she made of herself. The farmhouse was something removed from the war. It meant protection. That was all she considered. If there were watchers in the forest, none fired. Perhaps they simply noted her position and planned to save her for later, after the officers had declared the region secure and gone on. Perhaps then they would go after the English woman who hid in the farmhouse. But for that moment, under the harsh and crimson light of a setting battlefield sun, Adrienne St. Clair burst through the freely swinging wooden door of the farmhouse and felt herself safe from the soldiers. And she was right. The thing stirring in the root cellar would see to it.

  The farmhouse had seen other occupants since the farmer and his family had left. Empty ration cans, British and German, were heaped in a far corner. Shell casings lay like animal droppings near the windows. Except for a large, rough wooden table lying on its back and the splintered ruins of two chairs and a bedframe, the farmhouse was bare.

  Gasping for breath, her mind on a fine line between reality and unthinking animal terror, Adrienne stumbled about the farmhouse, looking without thinking for anything more which would offer protection. She thought of standing in the stone fireplace, body up the chimney, feet hidden by scraps of wood. It was foolish but she gave up the idea only when her scrabbling at the chimney showed her it was too small for her.

  Her hands were blackened with the soot from the fireplace. Some of it streaked across her face where she had brushed at her hair. The rough green fabric of her uniform trousers and jacket were caked with mud and thick clumps of burrs. She stomped back and forth across the farmhouse floor, desperately searching in the quickly fading light.

  Finally it entered her consciousness. The floor was wooden and her heavy, bootshod footsteps sounded hollowly across it. There was a cellar beneath the floor! A dark, protective cellar where she would be safe from the soldiers.

  She crawled around the floor, her breath in desperate gasps, feeling for the trapdoor she knew must be there.

  She couldn’t find it! She went to the table, lying on its back. She pushed against it, scraping it against the floor. She strained until it hit one of the stone walls of the farmhouse, but the rumbling it made as it moved along the wooden floorboards did not seem to end when its movement stopped. She listened for a moment, holding her breath. The panzers were coming closer.

  She clawed at the floor. Rotting splinters dug into her fingers and under her nails. Her hands felt cold and numb. She felt the indentation of a row of floorboards ending at the same point. The light was almost gone. She had found the entrance to the cellar.

  A knotted rope was tied through a hole in the trap-door. She pulled on it and the section of flooring swung up and fell over with a dull and ringing smash. If they’re outside in the field, they’ll have heard that, she thought, and her heart raced even more.

  She stared into the darkness of the root cellar. No light penetrated it at all. How deep was it? She pushed her head close to the edge, staring hard, yet could see nothing.

  She lay against the floor. Her head and arm overhanging the empty darkness of the hole into the cellar. Frantically she waved her arm around in the nothingless searching for a ladder. She could almost feel the thick wet smell of damp earth and rotting things well up from the darkness. The scent was warm and humid, as if she were reaching into a pit that held an immense animal whose fetid breath had seeped into everything, warming it, then dissolving it. Her arm tingled as this thought came to her and she imagined her arm swinging inches above the outreached claws of something in the cellar. But the panzers still advanced, and they were an evil she could comprehend.

  Then her hand hit it, off to the side of the hole. It was rough and wooden. She swung her head against it again to determine its position. Something thin and sharp and cold wrapped itself around her wrist. Instinctively she wrenched her hand backward. For a heart-stopping instant, she was trapped, held back. She screamed breathlessly through clenched teeth and wrenched again. There was a snapping sound. Her hand flew out of the cellar doorway with something dangling from it, sparkling like fish scales in moonlight. Adrienne was rigid in her terror. In the almost total darkness she could see vivid images of snakes. But the object slowed its swinging and cautiously she reached out for it with her other hand.

  It was cold and metal. Her hand recognised its shape. It was a crucifix. Someone had, for some reason, hung a crucifix from the top rung of the ladder leading to the cellar as though it were in a position of watchfulness, of protection. She shook her hand and the broken chain fell away. She tossed the crucifix into a far corner, and reached back into the darkness for the ladder.

  The ladder descended for eight rungs before her foot sunk into the damp cellar mud. Dirt from the slam of the trapdoor when she had pulled it down above her, covered her face in irritating little particles. Standing with both feet sliding into the oozing floor, she blew and sputtered and rubbed her face with her hands till she felt able to open her eyes again. When she did, there was nothing to be seen. Not even the ladder directly in front of her face.

  She ran her hands along the outside of her trouser pockets. She and most of the other nurses always carried matches to light the cigarettes of the soldiers who could smoke. Where were hers? She found them in a jacket pocket. There was at least half a box left. She felt her panic subsiding.

  In the light of the first match she was able to determine the size of the cellar. It was small, taking up perhaps half of the floorspace of the farmhouse above her. The beams of the floor overhead were silvery with spider webs. The walls of the cellar were simply earth with a few retaining timbers spaced regularly around. The wall farthest from the base of the ladder looked as though it had fallen victim to years of winter run-off. It seemed to have collapsed, sloping up and away from what would have been its original position. The earth from the washout had collected in a rough pile at the base of the wall, piling out along the floor. She also saw a box in a comer away from the mound of earth. She dropped the match to the damp floor. It sizzled for a moment and was extinguished. Then she walked carefully toward the box, no more than three or four feet away. Her boots slurped each time she lifted them from the muddy floor. She tapped the edge of the box with her toe. It was time to light another match, and open the box. Perhaps, she thought, there was food.

  The lid creaked oddly as she lifted it. The dull jumping light of the match barely seemed to penetrate the darkness within. Then she froze. The light picked out the form of a small figure, like a child, lying down in the box. The eyes were open but dull. Adrienne held a match closer, trembling. The figure was an old doll, paint flaking from its porcelain face, lying on a folded set of mildew spotted sheets. The cloth body fell away as she lifted the doll. The head tumbled into the chest and disappeared as the second match burned toward Adrienne’s fingers. She dropped it into the mud.

  At the very least, the box was a dry place to sit. And that’s what she did, leaning forward on her knees to keep from touching her back against the damp wall.

  Sound was effectively muffled by the moist earth surrounding he
r and she realised she would have no way of knowing if the Germans were right outside or if they had passed by. She decided she would worry about that later, when her watch said it was morning. For now she would rest and not worry about the darkness or the dampness or what could be lurking in them. She thought of whoever it had been who had laid the doll away, so long ago, so carefully; whoever it had been who had placed the crucifix on the ladder.

  Then she heard the first plop of earth fall into the damp floor. Rats she thought. The matches would save her. She lit another. No gleaming rat eyes stared out at her in the orange flicker of the match light. The match dropped into the mud. The earth shifting sound came out of the darkness. Another match, and there was nothing. Or was the mound the earth somehow different? The match sizzled on the floor. There was a long, liquid sucking sound as though something was lifting itself out of the clinging mud.

  Another match. Silence. She threw the match to the floor and lit another immediately after. The mound of earth was changing; pulsating like some enormous earth-worm turning in on itself. Another match and another. Like a strobe light, one flicker after another revealed a sudden jump in appearance. Adrienne was standing, the rush of her heartbeat filling her ears as she watched something trying to push its way out of the earth.

  And then the first of it was free. Something white and maggoty and rising up out of the dirt on its own. More of it lay below, throbbing to the surface.

  The match burned into Adrienne’s fingers. She gasped and scattered the open box around her. One match remained. She fumbled with it. It lit. The thing in the earth was a foot! The toes spread wide, stretching the clinging dirt and making it fall to the side.

  Another foot rose beside it and the forms of legs could be seen pushing through the earth in front of them. Then two arms. And a torso. And a hideously mud-caked head like a golem come to life.

  The match flickered closer to her fingers. The head turned slowly towards her. Eyes were somehow operating beneath the dirt which encased it. Then the dirt fell away and Adrienne was left staring at a man’s slug white face with eyes like black wounds untreated for days. And a gaping, sucking mouth that had fangs—

  The match went out. Dead against the blistered skin of her thumb and forefinger.

  She screamed then and flung herself headlong toward where she thought the ladder should be. In the darkness, she missed it, and collapsed into the clinging mud. Her screams turned to gurgling. She waved her arms frantically in front of her. She hit something solid. It was the ladder.

  Instantly she was crawling up it. The mud had soaked into her uniform and had weighted her down, making each movement seem ten times slower as if in a bad dream when she just couldn’t move fast enough. Her head banged against the solid trapdoor. Her grip slipped and she nearly slid back down. She threw up her hand and grabbed at the end of the knotted rope. It steadied her. She pushed her forearm against the trapdoor. It creaked slowly open. Too slowly.

  Adrienne gave it one last push and it swung up and over, crashing into the floor. Her head was above the level of the floor. Her waist. The hand grabbed her by the ankle and pulled.

  She screamed, shrieked, thought left her. She shook her leg, savagely kicked and connected, and was free.

  She jumped up from the ladder, cracking both shins against the hard edge of the trapdoor opening and rolled across the floor, sobbing hysterically.

  It was night. Moonlight cast soft shadows through the unshuttered windows. The interior of the farmhouse glowed faintly. The head appeared above the level of the floor. It saw her. And smiled. The fangs glistened in the moonlight.

  He rose slowly, smoothly, as if his body were not touching the ladder at all. He continued upward, hands by his side, until his foot stepped onto the floor and he walked toward her. His footsteps made no hollow echo on the wooden floors.

  She felt weightless in his arms as he lifted her. Her voice was gone from the moment he had stared at her in the moonlight. Her body would not move to protect her.

  Adrienne’s mind was like a person trapped on the bridge of a sinking ship. Everything was clear. The outcome was inevitable. And there was nothing to be done.

  In her mind she screamed, long and hard. But it did not drown out the ripping sound his teeth made as they sliced into her neck.

  She felt him nurse from her torn artery. Felt the insistence of his lips as they ringed the wound, slowly sucking up the flesh around it, then relaxing, letting the surface of her soft, white neck fall back. His tongue felt smooth as it swirled around the hole he had made, coaxing the blood out in its rhythmic spurts. The pain of the bite gradually eased. The warmth of her body slowly faded from her arms and legs, concentrating in the warmth which grew in her neck. She could feel the strong contractions of his throat as he drank from her. She felt herself spinning, round and round. The only focus was her neck where he sucked on her. She was melting, flowing into him. Faster. Faster. The swallowing stronger, the contractions of his throat more intense. Her vision fell away into tunnels of shifting sparks. One red point was fixed in the swirls. And it grew. Pulsating over everything else. She wanted it to come closer, to swallow her completely. Closer and—

  The spiralling was real. He had thrown her through the air to land limply near the trapdoor. Dimly she saw that the farmhouse door had burst open. Men in grey uniforms, moonlight glinting off the barrels of their weapons, talked in German. Their voices were slow and far away.

  One of them swept a light through the farmhouse. She saw him stop it suddenly, his face twisting into an expression of horror. The three other men raised their weapons and smoke and fire flared through the farmhouse. Adrienne pushed herself over to look toward the other side of the room. The thing that had fed from her was pinned against the stone wall. Chips of stone and clouds of dust leapt from the wall behind him. His mud-stained, already ruined clothing danced around him with the bullets’ impact. But when the weapons clicked on empty, he attacked.

  His body, pockmarked with small dark punctures where bullets had entered and left, glistened with a white shiny liquid that seemed to coat his skin like the gelatinous slime of snails. It highlighted the rippling of his lean muscles as he leapt fifteen feet across the farmhouse and onto the soldiers.

  Adrienne watched the butchery in slow motion. With her own blood streaming from his howling mouth, the creature tore into the soldiers as if they were no more than the rotting doll in the cellar chest. Arms and heads flew. Three were dismembered almost instantly. The fourth, the one who had stood well back with the flashlight, ran screaming from the farmhouse.

  The creature did not give chase. Instead he gathered the pieces of the first three soldiers and carried them, oozing and dripping, to the trapdoor. Vaguely, Adrienne was aware of the sound and vibrations of approaching tanks. She wondered if this thing knew about tanks. Then he picked her up, again without the slightest strain, and threw her down into the pit of the cellar. Adrienne felt herself float through the damp cellar air. She had no sensation of impact. The bodies of the dismembered soldiers had cushioned her.

  She lay on her back, staring up into the farmhouse through the trapdoor. The creature stood at the edge. He looked down at her. His mouth working like a fish. Gaping, sucking. Adrienne wanted him to come and finish her. He looked away. The tank noises were louder, then gone, swallowed by the thunderous crash that roared through the farmhouse, turning the moonlit interior into brilliant day.

  The shell must have entered through the door or window and exploded on the far wall. Jagged stones ripped through the air. The creature was impaled upon them, caught by the explosive wind, and blasted down the hole in the floor. Adrienne watched him fall toward her. In the half second more that he existed she saw his body ripped and split by shards of stone. She tried desperately to raise her arms to him, to welcome him to her. But he was gone. Dissolved. Dust in the sunlight. The rocks fell lightly around her. Their velocity absorbed by their impact with the creature’s body. And Adrienne was covered with the thick c
ascade of what was left of him. The white blood of life. The blood of yber.

  It smeared across her face, dripped into her mouth and she came alive. Movement returned to her limp arms. The taste of the thick liquid was indescribable and made her ravenous. She trembled with the touch of it on her tongue. She wiped it off her face into her mouth, off her hands and arms and body. From the ladder rungs. And then, it led her to something even more wonderful, more satisfying, where it had dripped from her to what lay below.

  It led her to the soldiers’ bodies. And their blood. This was Adrienne St. Clair’s Communion.

  Chapter Three

  HELMAN WAS SILENT. The creature who sat across from him—the undead, the nosferatu, all the names he could remember from the stories—trembled with the telling of her story. She stared at the floor of the hotel room. Her shaking hands clasping each other on her knees. Helman reached out as if to take her hands, as if to comfort her. But he hesitated, and she looked up, and the moment was gone.

  “More than thirty years ago that happened. Sometimes when I wake up, it still feels as though it happened just the night before, and if I open my eyes I’ll see nothing but darkness, and feel the bodies of those soldiers beneath me.” She looked away from him, staring into the darkness of that long ago cellar.

  “What happened to the thing, the yber that attacked you?”

  She took a deep breath. “The stone shards from the exploding wall acted like a stake through the chest. One of them must have penetrated his heart. It was the Final Death for him. The First Death for me. His body dissolved. Just like in the movies, Granger. Upon the Final Death an yber’s body decays incredibly rapidly. The longer we are yber, the faster the decay is. Had I been given the Final Death the next night, my body would have looked like any human’s body. If it happened today, I’d be gone in seconds.” She shrugged. The personal part of her story which had been exposed in her as she told it, had dropped beneath the surface again. It was now a technical discussion. Helman regretted not taking her hand when the moment had seemed right.