But it was that night in September that remained most prominent in his memory—that night of terror and magic. The coach was moving through the Keyding Pass escorted by four soldiers when the driver suddenly slowed. One of the soldiers had sighted huge rocks, fallen from the slab of stone overhead to block the road. Suddenly, as the horses pawed the earth wildly and the driver tried to calm them, figures leaped from the rocks and trees, attacking the mounted soldiers. The horses screamed and reared. They took off with the coach racing, and suddenly a filthy, grinning death’s head of a face peered in at a side window. The horses broke their harnesses; the coach shuddered and pitched off the road, crashing over and over down a rocky incline into the cold arms of a mountain stream.
Conrad had opened his eyes inside the coach to see dark, ragged figures scurrying outside, breaking in through the shattered wood. His father and Sonya lay before him like broken dolls, and he knew at once that they were dead. He’d tried to fight off the things as they came swarming in, but one of his arms wouldn’t work, and a hulking form covered with filth and lice grabbed him up like a piece of kindling and carried him off into the night. Others chased after, and he was flung aside several times as the things fought, rolling over and over on the ground, hammering at each other, hissing and snarling with demonic fury. Finally, a long way from the Keyding Pass, he was carried into a cavern that smelled of Death and vermin. The thing that held him threw him to the floor, and it was then that he saw the vampir’s face and recognized it for what it was. The thing looked more like an animal than a man, with long, dirty black hair and a scraggly black beard. Its eyes glowed with bursts of red and silver, its fangs dripped saliva, and its fingernails were hooked like claws. The vampir had approached, whining in its eagerness to feed, and had leaped upon the boy like a leech.
And the following night Conrad Vulkan had awakened as one of the Undead.
For a while he’d lived as the rest of them did—in a series of deep, winding caverns cut through the mountains, feeding independently on whatever he could find, usually rats, boars, or an occasional human who’d taken the wrong road. He fought like an animal to defend his sleeping and eating spaces, losing both of them many times and always digging out new ones in the cavern’s clay floors. Eventually he realized that several of them always followed him to the stream where he washed the lice and roaches out of his clothes. They watched him curiously and eventually began to do the same thing. Many of them babbled in strange tongues he’d never heard before, and most of them couldn’t communicate at all. After a while he began to speak with several of them through a crude sign language and organized them into hunting parties. And then came the great realization of his new existence. He was, after all, a prince. Why could he not be a king to his new subjects? He organized the group into foodgatherers, scouts, and firetenders, and he began teaching them a common language. It was a slow process, but after a long while they began to trust each other, to see themselves as brothers and sisters of the night. They expanded their hunting range, raiding the nearby villages for children who would add the gifts of youth and speed to the collective. In those days Conrad knew very little of what he was or the powers he could control; he simply craved survival and recognized blood as Life.
And finally he was ready to return to the castle of his birth.
His scouts reported that it was in Germanic hands now. So this was to be a mission of warfare as well as a mission of survival. Vulkan contemplated the problem of taking the castle. He knew its interior as well as he knew the palm of his star-crossed hand, but its high, sheer walls would stop even an army of the Undead. And while he contemplated, he watched a rat scurrying back and forth from its nest down in the guts of the cavern where the rock was riddled with cracks and holes.
He began to stretch his power, to test its limits. He stared at the scuttling rat and, concentrating fiercely, made it freeze in mid-step. He made it turn, made it run backwards, made it spin like a child’s top. Then he let it go deeper into the cavern, following it with his mind, and made it return to him day after day. Then he did the same to two rats. Three. Four. A dozen rats, spinning in circles before him while the other vampir looked on in amazement. He laughed and clapped his hands because now it was becoming effortless. He could feel his will build upon itself, like the dark stones of his father’s castle piled one on top of another. Soon a hundred rats danced for him, chittering and squeaking in mindless ecstasy. When he could bring three hundred rats out of the cavern’s bowels and control them with a mere squint of his mind, he sent his army out into the mountains.
The rats found it a simple task to squeeze through the holes and cracks in the walls of Castle Vulkan. It took less than a week for the plague to follow. Prince Vulkan could stand on a hillock, hidden by the forest, and see the dark plumes of smoke rising from within the castle keep—bodies were being burned by the dozens. The death wagon rattled in and out of the castle every night with its cargo of corpses. He could hear the screams and moans of the dying, and the death song brought a smile to his face. On a cold, snowy February night, while the doors were unbarred to let the deathwagon out, he led his vampir army into the castle. They met no resistance.
Prince Vulkan opened his eyes. Again he’d felt a cold breath stirring at the back of his neck.
A bow sobbed across violin strings. The music echoed like a wail through the chamber.
Vulkan turned his head and saw the Headmaster standing before the fire, holding a bone-white violin beneath its chin; a gnarled claw gripped the bow with cunning delicacy. The Headmaster’s eyes burned low, as deceptively cool as the last embers of the fire. The music went on for a few minutes more and ended with a low growl that sent vibrations shivering through the prince.
“My pupil, my favorite,” the Headmaster said. “Your army grows. How many?”
“More than six hundred thousand.” Vulkan replied.
“Ah, good. Very good. But we must have more, Conrad. And quickly. You recall our agreement: In return for my services you must hand this city over to me on All-Hallow’s Eve. That time approaches quickly, Conrad. I expect eight million in my service as my due by tomorrow midnight.”
“We double in strength every night. How can I give you that many?”
The Headmaster’s teeth flashed. “An orgy of hunger, Conrad. A celebration of power unlike any the world has ever seen. Let them gorge and throw up and gorge again, like a vast Roman orgy. Let them run wild and take as many victims as they can. I’ve observed how you saw fit to deal with the problem of your servant Roach. That may have been less than wise, Conrad. You forget the power of the media, and you also forget that special element that blinds the human race to your existence, their dogged determination—no, let’s call it hope—that your kind doesn’t exist. The element of surprise and confusion may soon be gone. We have to act now, in accord.” The Headmaster’s eyes closed for a few seconds. When they reopened, they were as bright as blast furnaces, and the prince could hardly stand to look at them for fear of dwindling to a cinder.
“I hunger for souls, Conrad. I hunger…” The Headmaster held the white violin in its hands and very slowly crumpled it into a ball as if it were paper. The claws clapped shut. Vulkan stared, seeing something begin to glow yellow-orange between the Headmaster’s hands. The Headmaster opened its hands as slowly as it had crushed the violin. Something was taking shape between them, glowing golden. When the brightness dimmed, the prince saw it was a gold urn about two feet high, filled to the top with coarse sand. “I give you this gift,” the Headmaster said softly and held the urn out to Vulkan. It radiated heat. “Take up a handful of sand.”
The prince hesitated only a second, then scooped up some sand. It burned in his palm.
“Drop it back in,” the Headmaster said. Vulkan did so, and the Headmaster leaned forward, blowing softly on the falling column of sand. It began to writhe, slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed. The column stood upright, about six inches high like a small cyclone. Vulkan thought he cou
ld hear the distant shrieking of wind.
The Headmaster stepped past Prince Vulkan and set the urn at the center of the table. “Our powers are united. No one is to disturb this in any way, Conrad. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“Good. The sun’s graying the sky to the east; soon you’ll sleep. Rest well and easy. When you awaken, you’ll see that my gift has brought you the ability to move at will with your entire army throughout the whole of this city. And the humans will be powerless to run, powerless to escape in their cars or planes or boats. So sleep well, Conrad, there’ll be much work for you when you awaken.” The Headmaster stared at the urn again, grinned, and then began to fade away. The last thing to disappear was the terrible, fanged grin. Then it, too, was gone.
Prince Vulkan looked at the golden urn. The sand was twisting with more force now, a corkscrew of power. The cry of distant wind sounded like the droning of an insect, greedy and voracious.
The fire was almost cold now. Outside the hateful sun would be climbing the eastern peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains. It was time to rest, to plan, to prepare for the next night.
And oh, he thought, oh, what a night that will be!
FOUR
Palatazin awakened to the sound of something creaking. At least he thought he was awake because he could see the ceiling and feel Jo pressed against him. He’d been dreaming of a shadowy forest where hands seemed to snake out of the underbrush to grasp at him. The trees bent over from both sides, making the pathway ahead look like a narrow tunnel walled with thorns and brush. Pallid faces grinned, floating in the foliage like balloons from a Satanic carnival. Jo was with him, and they were running headlong through the tunnel when something hulking and monstrous stepped into their path, reaching out to welcome them with hooked claws.
And now he knew he was awake, and something was creaking softly in his bedroom.
Another earth tremor, he thought, and he reached out for the lamp switch. The creaking stopped immediately. Palatazin later regretted not switching on the light, but instead he turned his head and peered into the darkness.
His mother was sitting in her rocking chair again, watching him; her face bore a stern, grim expression that reminded him of the times when she got so angry if he dared creep back into bed for a few extra moments of sleep before getting dressed for school. Sleepyhead! she’d chide, wrenching all the covers off the bed. And then, clapping her hands with the noise of righteous thunder: Get up! Get up! Get up! He didn’t realize until later how she’d equated sleeping with death.
Palatazin stared at the figure in the chair. Her eyes were frightened but determined, too. They were the eyes of the woman who’d fired a shotgun at the unholy thing that wore her husband’s flesh like a suit of clothes. She rose from the chair, and Palatazin could see the window—with its spray-painted cross at the center—through her form. She motioned to him, Get up, sleepyhead! He was frozen with wonder for a few seconds, but then he carefully rolled out of bed so as not to disturb Jo. She murmured something in her sleep, stirred slightly, and then was quiet.
His mother motioned him closer. He took a step forward; he could see the deep lines around her mouth and eyes as if they were superimposed on the wall. Then she turned and pointed past his shoulder. He looked and saw she was pointing toward the closet door. He glanced between her face and the closet, not knowing what she meant. Her face was clouded with despair, her mouth working but no sound coming out. Then, abruptly, she stepped past him—he felt a breath of air, and for a second he smelled the childhood aromas of cookies baking, the breeze through a stand of pines, a coat Papa had bought her in Budapest—and then she walked right into the closet through the closed door.
Like smoke that has whirled through an open window, she was gone.
Palatazin found himself unable to move for a moment. He realized he’d been holding his breath, and now he let it all out. He turned, switched on the bedside lamp and went to the closet.
“Andy! What is it?” Jo was sitting up in bed, her face as white as the sheets that were bunched around her.
“It’s all right,” he said, and heard his voice shake. “It’s nothing.” But no, he knew it was something. His mother had been trying to speak to him through the barrier between life and death, and he knew the message was of vital importance. He gripped the doorknob, turned it, and pulled open the closet door.
He didn’t know what he’d expected to find—his mother’s spirit standing in there, perhaps, staring at him through the clothes? The closet all torn up as if a violent storm had whipped through the walls?
But there was nothing. The clothes were undisturbed. On the top shelf cardboard boxes were stacked up just as they always had been.
“What is it?” Jo asked. “What are you looking for?”
“I…don’t know,” he told her. What’s in here? What is it that’s important enough to disturb my mother’s rest?
“It’s getting light outside,” Jo said. “Can’t you sleep?”
“No.” He pushed the clothes back and forth for a moment, even felt the wall behind them. What am I looking for? A secret passage in my own house? He reached up to the shelf and moved a couple of the boxes around. Jo’s skeins of wool and knitting materials were in one, some old shoes he’d even forgotten he’d had in another. There were some sweaters, packed in mothballs. He was putting the boxes back when he saw the glint of rusted metal in the far corner behind a box he used to store his gun and holster.
The metal box his mother had saved all her newspaper clippings in. The box that had been at her bedside when she’d died.
Palatazin lifted it down from the shelf. “Andy…” Jo began to protest, but she was instantly quiet when she saw how tight his face had become and how his eyes had begun to shine with what looked like to her a maniacal fascination. She watched in silence as he sat on the bed, opened the old metal box, and began to look through the clippings, some of them so yellowed they were barely legible. She could see some of the headlines—Prominent College Prof Says Vampires Do Exist; What Strange Force Turned Lizbethville Into A Ghost Town?; Fourth Cow Found Killed By Vandals; Line McRae, Powhatan Civic Leader, Still On Missing Persons List; Bats Plague Midwestern Town For Third Day. Most of them were cut from the National Enquirer, Midnight, The Star, and Fate magazine, but there were dozens clipped from the pages of the Times, the Herald-Examiner, a host of smaller L.A. papers, and whatever out-of-state papers Andy’s mother could get her hands on. At one time her room in this house had been filled with old magazines and newspapers, and there were boxes stacked tall with them down in the basement. The silverfish had started coming in droves, and Jo had demanded that the papers go immediately. Andy had hauled them away but only to make room for the next batch his mother had begun saving. Jo had gone half-crazy trying to keep the place clean, always vacuuming and dusting and picking up scraps of newspapers. It had been the worst just before she’d gone into Golden Gardens.
Palatazin turned the box upside down, dumping all the clippings out in a thick pile.
“What are you doing?” Jo gasped. “You’ll get the sheets dirty!”
He paid no attention to her. He began reading the clippings one by one. The first was ragged and yellow and bore the headline: Crate Filled With Dirt Found In NYC Hotel Room. The story from the New York Times was only two graphs long but went on to say that police had found the imprint of a human body on top of the dirt and speculated that it had served as some kind of strange, makeshift casket. The next item was also from the Times and was headed Rash Of Disappearances Continues—ConEd Exec Latest Missing.
Palatazin picked up the next yellowed item, a small squib with the headline Bats In NYC Subways? A workman inspecting a section of track had seen something large and black down there, clinging to a wall like a bat with enfolded wings. When the man had shined his flashlight, the thing had screeched and come swooping toward him, but he’d run like hell to the nearest platform. One of the man’s quotes intrigued Palatazin—“Mr. Luftek told
police, ‘If it was a bat, it was one the size of a man! It’ll be a cold day in hell before I go back down in that tunnel!’” Palatazin went through the next few stories, all about disappearances and prowlers in the New York City area, and found one that chilled his blood—Historic Cemetery Vandalized. It was dated August 24, 1948, and the cemetery was located near Martha’s Furnace, Pennsylvania. There were more clippings of people missing, animals found drained of blood, most of them in the Pittsburgh area. Another cemetery was vandalized near Canton, Ohio. The town of Paulinwood, Indiana, had to be evacuated because of a siege of rats and flies. A banker and his family were missing from their home in Mt. Carmel, Illinois, and his neighbors were frightened because they’d heard insane laughter in the middle of the night. In May of 1950 the townspeople of Dean’s Field, Illinois, vanished overnight; food was still on the table in farmhouse kitchens, sheets were turned down in beds that would never be slept in again, lights were on, and doors unlocked; the only sign of “foul play” were several shattered mirrors. The next few clippings concerned similar events in Missouri.
“My God,” Palatazin said softly. “They’ve been moving westward all this time.”
“What?” Jo’s brow was furrowed deeply. She rose from the bed and put on her robe. “Do you want some coffee?”
He looked up at her, blinking heavy-lidded eyes. “My mother knew. All these years she knew they were slowly moving west. My God! She knew and had to keep silent because no one would believe…” He quickly turned through the rest of the clippings his mother had saved just before she died. The last one was an Enquirer article about a man in Caborca, Mexico, who’d murdered three women with a hatchet and drank their blood because, he told the police, he’d felt possessed by a vampiro.
They Thirst Page 35