He was sitting on the ground, back propped against the trunk of a hoary oak tree. His arms hung limply at his sides. His cheek lay against his shoulder.
Someone had ripped out his throat.
There was blood all down the front of his body, blood pooled between his thighs. Blood had sprayed eight feet up the trunk of the tree he leaned against. His eyes stared through us, glazed and lifeless, as we drew close. His tongue protruded from his slack jaw.
“I didn't see anyone,” Halde panted, standing over his dead brother. “He didn’t make a sound!” He scanned the forest with reddened eyes.
“We should not linger,” Brulde whispered in my ear. “Our enemy may be close.”
I nodded. I had squatted down to examine the corpse. The wound to Tetch’s throat was exactly the same as Fodar’s injury, a single ragged flap, as if something sharp had struck him violently. Unlike Fodar, however, Tetch’s blood was quite evident. There were spatters of blood on the leaves as far as ten feet away. I tried to imagine what sort of weapon might make a wound like that. I’d never seen its like.
I rose. “Halde,” I said, and then more urgently, “Halde!”
His eyes twitched in my direction.
“We'll come back for your brother, give him a proper burial, but right now we need to move. There's nothing we can do for him now. We need to remove ourselves, hide and watch the body.”
“But my brother--!”
“Swallow your anger, Halde. Who will avenge your brother if they kill us, too?”
It took a moment for my admonition to penetrate his pain, but then I saw him put aside his grief and pull his thoughts together. Halde wiped his eyes with the back of his arm, spared his brother’s body one last mournful glance and then he crouched down and followed us away.
We moved to a short distance, sheltering behind a fallen tree. We took up position. Brulde guarded our backs while Halde and I peered through the intertwined branches of our cover.
“Now we watch,” I whispered to Halde. “Perhaps our enemies will return to the scene.”
The muscles of Halde’s face tightened. “If they do, I will kill them.”
But aside from Tetch's corpse, there were no other signs of our enemy’s presence. The wilderness was dense but not so dense that we could not take in the full of our surroundings, and we saw no one. Birds chattered. Squirrels scampered in the treetops, leaping from branch to branch. For all I could tell, we were the only humans in the forest. Even so, my heart raced as I stood watch over Tetch’s body. I expected our adversaries to burst forth from their hiding places at any moment. The forest had a feeling of ambush, even though I could hear nothing but the usual animal sounds of the woodland.
I was very aware that we had become separated from the rest of our party. Perhaps that was part of our enemy’s strategy. Divide and conquer. Finally, I looked to Halde.
“We need to find the others,” I said. I nudged Brulde and he leaned in to listen. “We need to rejoin the group. Apart, we are vulnerable. Easy prey.”
Halde met my eyes and nodded. The shock of his brother’s death was wearing off. His eyes had lost the gleam of hysteria, had become cold and vengeful instead.
“One at a time,” I said. “Keeping each other in sight.”
Halde rose and crouch-jogged away. Brulde followed, then I a moment later. We passed through the sun-dappled shadows for several minutes, moving to rejoin our party.
Father would be furious with me for breaking away from the group, I thought. We had chased after Halde without thought of the consequences. “You foolish boy!” Gan would yell, probably as he clomped me on the head. Foolish, impulsive, reckless… I could hear him already. And he would be right. I should have known better.
I lost sight of Halde as he passed over the hilltop. Brulde stumbled in the crumbly soil and went to his knees. He rose and glanced back at me, dusting his knees with chagrin. I grinned at him, shaking my head.
We heard a sharp cry.
Halde had met his fate.
11
It is no surprise how quickly the members of our war party were hunted down in the forest of the Gray Stone People. Knowing my own vampiric talents, the fact that five of us eluded detection and survived through the night gives testament only to the contempt our enemies had for us. By daybreak, the only ones left alive-- though we did not know the full count ourselves– was Kort-Lenthe, the half-breed Tavet, my companion Brulde, my father and myself.
We followed Halde's cry and found him lying in a shallow brook. I cannot say he was lying facedown in the water because he had no face. His entire head was missing. Brulde made a belching sound as we stood over Halde's body, fighting to hold down his breakfast. As Halde's blood drained from the tattered stump of his neck, swirling in strange patterns down the slowly moving rill, I was glad I had eaten very little that morning. I don’t think I would have fared as well as my companion.
“Where is his head?” Brulde whispered, gazing at me with fear-bright eyes.
I shrugged, trying to stay low and look in all directions at once. “They took it, I suppose.”
“Who took it?” Brulde hissed. “And why would they take his head?”
Before I could answer—not that I had an answer for my friend, only platitudes—we heard a rustle of movement. We crouched, fingers tightening on our weapons, hearts jumping into our throats.
But it was only Tavet.
The hybrid Neanderthal rounded the hill. Something wet and tangled hung from his fist. It was Halde's head. He saw the body lying in the rivulet and stopped. After a moment, he continued on. He drew alongside us and dropped the head beside its body. “Did you see Halde fall?” he asked, wiping his bloody hands on his thighs. “Someone threw his head at me, but I did not see who it was. Or what.”
“I've seen nothing but our own corpses,” I answered, scowling fiercely. Halde stared up at me, jaw agape. His eyes were wide and empty, like the eyes of a dead fish. I reached down and pushed them shut with my fingertips but they sprang open again. I looked away with a shudder, focused on Tavet, who stood surveying the forest with his fists planted on his hips.
“I’ve lost sight of Git and your father,” Tavet confessed.
“What do we do now?” Brulde asked. “We're just getting picked off one by one.”
“We should regroup,” Tavet replied. “We’ve allowed our enemy to separate us.”
I marveled at the hulking man. He was so nonchalant! Stony nerves were a trait of his Neanderthal ancestry, I knew, like his coarse red hair and broad, heavily muscled physique. Still I was impressed. Would that I could be so dispassionate! There was a small but piercing voice in my head that kept crying, Run away! Our enemy has out-maneuvered us! Run away! Run away now before it’s too late! Every man has a coward inside of him, a craven little spirit that cares for no one but himself, nothing but his own comfort and safety. Courage is having the will to ignore those shrill cries.
I forced myself to look into Halde’s bulging, dead-fish eyes. I thought of my wives and children and said to that voice: Quiet, you! I will not run away!
We searched for them then, moving as stealthily as possible. My father and the rest of our band could not be very far away, but we found only faint traces of their passage—a footprint here, a broken branch there—as the sun rolled steadily across the sky. We did not dare call out for them, nor move with careless haste through the woods. And then night came and we gave up the search to find shelter.
We found a fallen tree roofed by a mound of detritus, a natural lean-to. The opening of the hide was camouflaged by ferns, which had rooted in the accumulated mulch atop the log. “This will do,” I said with a nod, eyeing our sanctuary critically. I hoped I sounded more sure than I felt.
Tavet, Brulde and I spent the night huddled beneath that tree. We crowded together in that dank hollow, blinking out through the fronds of the overhanging ferns, our breath steaming from our lips, while unseen things moved in the darkness beyond. We heard them from time t
o time-- quick, stealthy movements, a snapping branch, a menacing snarl-- but dared not go out to confront the creatures. Not at night. Not in the darkness, where we would be blind and all but helpless. So we crouched in that moist crevice, knees to our chins, shuddering in helpless despair each time we heard another member of our band of warriors cry out in their final agonies.
None of us spoke, and none of us slept.
Once during the night I heard a bestial howl, a shrill cry of triumph that was terribly familiar. It was the piercing cry of the beast that had stalked our search party so many nights past. It was the Lizard Man. Hearing it, my skin rashed into goose bumps and I began to tremble with dread. If Tavet and Brulde had not been at my side, I think I would have given in to my fear and betrayed myself to the hunter. Of the three of us, I alone had seen the creature with my own eyes. I alone knew what was hunting us in the dark. I could see it in my mind’s eye. Those stake-like teeth. Those baleful, lambent eyes. That strange white flesh, and the unnatural way it twisted its body as it crawled on all fours. It was only Brulde, gripping my hand when he sensed the direction of my thoughts, who kept me from leaping from my hiding place and running away through the forest... most likely into the fiend's fatal embrace.
When the woods at last fell silent, it was even more terrible.
I waited for the monster to find us, to come snarling out of the darkness, eyes burning like coals, and snatch us from our hiding place. After awhile, my imaginings became so terrible that I almost wished for it to happen. At least then, this terrible waiting would be over!
But it did not find us.
I think it gave up its play, glutted perhaps or simply tired. Maybe it had grown bored with the game. That is all we were to it. A game. A faintly amusing distraction. We no more threatened a creature like that than a gnat can threaten a man. One slap and the gnat is dead. As we were for it, or so I’m sure it believed. After a while, the forest went quiet, terribly quiet, and when dawn broke and we could see again, we moved with exaggerated caution from our hiding place and went in search of our lost brothers.
The three of us crept shoulder-to-shoulder through the dense morning mist, ears straining for any sound, bodies stiff and aching from our long vigil. The forest was an alien world in the fog, unnatural and hostile. The trees were dark obelisks in the mist, the sun a faint disc. Rain felt imminent, or perhaps it would be sleet or snow. It was certainly cold enough for snow. The air was heavy with the threat of bad weather, like a promise of violence.
“Should we depart for home?” Tavet murmured. “I think our task is hopeless. We are defeated.”
“We should return home and come back with more warriors,” Brulde said. “Ten was not enough.”
“The cave of the Gray Stone People is not far. We should at least go and see if our enemies have encamped there, then we can decide what we should do next,” I answered.
I did not wish to abandon the others, to abandon my father, but what if they had retreated during the night? What if they had already fled home? What if we three were all that remained? Someone had to return and warn the others.
“What if we are all that still live?” Brulde asked, speaking my worries aloud.
“I am sure we were not all killed during the night,” I tried to reassure him.
“I am not,” Brulde replied.
“Be brave, men,” Tavet steadied us. “We can only die once. Let us proceed to Gray Stone. But let us go quietly. Let us be cunning. Perhaps we can study our enemy before we retreat. It would be a great benefit to know who it is we fight.”
We had not advanced far when we came upon the remains of the Gray Stone People.
12
The first bogeyman startled me. So much so that I cursed aloud before I could champ my teeth and bite it back. I even cocked my spear to throw it.
We were still in the forest, but the trees were getting thinner, and there were wide yards of open grass between the peaks and troughs of the hilly terrain, not valleys so much as elevated meadows, each one a pleasant surprise. We came across the Fat Hands in one of those hillside leas.
We were not far from the cave of the Gray Stone People now. We had not yet found any other members of our party. It was still just the three of us. We were skirting around the grassy shelf—it was not safe to cut through the middle—when I saw what looked like a man standing in a tree.
I pushed through the underbrush and peered out into the clearing… and jumped back with a curse. Several yards ahead, out in the middle of the field, a Fat Hand warrior hung from a scaffolding of crudely bound tree branches.
His arms were spread in a cruciform position, his ankles bound with twists of vine. His head was thrown back, face frozen in its final contortions. His throat had been torn out, much like Tetch and Fodar’s had been. Late-autumn flies, fat and shiny green, orbited his body like a swarm of tiny satellites, humming, lighting on his flesh. They crawled in and out of his open wounds. They dined and laid their eggs and flew away. Already, tiny maggots squirmed in his eyes and nostrils.
I recognized the unfortunate Neanderthal. Gorum was his name. We had whiled away many summer afternoons at the river, fishing and trading jokes and gossip. He was one of Stodd's sons, only a little older than myself.
Brulde had come running at my shout. I signaled for him to look and held the branches open. He peered out into the meadow, then twitched back as if someone had tried to slap him, a look of revulsion on his face.
“That is Gorum!” he hissed.
“I know.”
Tavet peered over our shoulders, curious. “That is Gorum.”
I tasted bile at the back of my throat and wiped my mouth. Brulde was nearly white with fear. Only Tavet appeared unshaken. The burly half-breed motioned for us to continue.
I stilled my rolling belly as best I could, gathered the tattered remainders of my courage and followed the Neanderthal.
We passed two more human scarecrows, the increasingly savage defilement of their bodies screwing dread ever deeper into our guts. The third Fat Hand we found had been disemboweled. His flyblown intestines dangled from the hollowed chamber of his ribcage. His guts unwound in bloated loops and coils all the way to the leafy ground, a bridge of human flesh traveled busily by insects.
“Evil works... evil works,” Tavet muttered. His Neanderthal stoicism was finally giving way to apprehension. “This land is cursed! We should retreat now before we share the same fate as those poor Fat Hands!”
I think I would have agreed if we had not found my father.
We saw Gan up the rise ahead of us, crouched behind some bushes. At the sight of the venerable old warrior, the rind of ice that had been accruing around my heart, like the layers of a pearl, shattered and fell away. I had been growing ever more certain that he was dead, was already mourning him in my thoughts. My relief was like sunlight breaking through dismal clouds, and I thought, He lives! My father lives!
I was even more relieved to see that he was uninjured. His clothing was dirty and stained with dried blood and his great mane of gray hair was filthy and tangled, but otherwise he looked whole and healthy.
He sensed our presence and wheeled around, a knife gripped in his fist. Our eyes met and his face went slack; his eyes widened and went curiously soft for a moment. I imagine he was thinking the very same thing I had thought: He lives! My son lives! Then his eyes hardened again and he motioned for us to join him. Stay low and keep quiet, he signed.
I squatted down beside him, putting my hand upon his shoulder. I felt rejuvenated by the contact, as if some mysterious energy had flowed from his body to mine. I thought that I might weep of relief. I was exhausted, my nerves screwed up to a fever pitch. My emotional control was wearing thin.
“There up ahead,” father hissed, nodding with his head. “Standing at the mouth of the cave.”
We slithered forward, finding gaps in the cover of the bushes through which to spy ahead. To the southeast, the forest thinned appreciably, giving way to a rocky clearing
that rose to the mount of the Gray Stone People.
Rain and ice and wind had eroded the mountaintop over the eons, splitting ancient strata of limestone and shale into great gray slabs. Those stone slabs lay one atop the next, each successive boulder slightly recessed from the one below, forming a natural staircase in the side of the mountain. At the summit, those limestone blocks were piled into a sort of cockeyed colonnade that let onto the cavern the Neanderthals had dwelled in.
I had been inside their cave once, many years before, when father went to treat with the Neanderthals over some territorial dispute. I remember how impressed I was by the echoing vastness of the Fat Hands’ cave, and how beautifully it was decorated, with hangings and wall paintings and countless religious shrines, which they made from sticks and feathers and shells, each with a little fire inside, a crude little lantern made from a turtle shell, plant oil and a woven cords of flax fiber.
Even the opening of the cave was big-- nearly three times a man's height and easily eight times that in width.
Dotting the slope to either side of the stone staircase were more of the bogeymen. A half-dozen human scarecrows had been arranged haphazardly along the path to the cave. There were also a handful of pikes with just the heads placed on them. The fiend who made me a vampire had erected these bogeymen to frighten away the curious, and let me tell you, I was frightened! If not for my father, I would have fled with my tail tucked between my legs. Primitive as we were, ours was an egalitarian society with little inclination to violence. We lived peaceably with our neighbors and did not fight except in self-defense. I could not quite comprehend such savagery. It was foreign to me, and all the more fearsome for it. It nearly broke my courage.
It looked as if all the Fat Hands who had stayed behind to insure the escape of their loved ones had been killed and put on display, and more. My maker was as indiscriminate as he was thorough. Old, young, male, female; he had spared no one.
One of the nearer ones, I saw, was Frag.
The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All: Revised and Expanded (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 1) Page 15