The Collector 03 - The Big Reap

by Chris F. Holm

  Turns out, it didn’t matter. Lilith was just fine on her own.

  The woman’s swing continued full-bore past me toward Lilith. Lilith laughed and caught the blade midair with both hands – grabbing the sharpened edges as if they were rubber-gripped handles – and used the momentum of the woman’s (ah, to hell with it – I may as well just say vampire’s) swing to lift her off her feet and slam her into the stone wall. She hit hard enough to loosen mortar, and then stuck there, nails dug in as she peered with rage and hatred down at us over one shoulder. She scurried up the wall, then, like a spider – faster than I would have thought possible, had I not seen Simon Magnusson perform a similar trick – and then hurled herself downward toward Lilith.

  Doubtless she was going for a killing blow. Unfortunately for her, when it came, she was on the receiving end of it.

  As she plummeted toward Lilith, claws and teeth bared like a jungle cat’s, Lilith spun, swinging the axe in a loping uppercut with such force that she split the vampire in two from head to crotch. Each side hit the stone floor with a wet FWACK, bouncing from the force of impact. Brain matter and entrails spewed across the floor and walls, but still, the woman’s left side and right flailed madly about, eyes moving independently as what was left of her human consciousness tried and failed to grapple with the confusing barrage of nonsensical stimuli its body was supplying. Luckily, it didn’t have to grapple long. Lilith brought down the axe blade in two quick chops, lopping the split remains of the woman’s head. Then Lilith ground the mangled beast’s stilled heart to pulp beneath one bare heel. “Head and heart,” she said. “Only way to be sure.”

  “Words to live by,” I said, wide-eyed, horrified, and trying not to puke.

  Lilith shook viscera off her hands with nonchalant grace and stepped lightly toward the arrow slit to the right of the door we’d just exited. Three feet high, but a scant six inches wide, it looked out over the craggy mountain slope, the village of Nevazut, and the switchback dirt road that connected the two. “Come on,” she said, “we’d best get moving.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because the rest will be here soon.”

  I trotted over to the window and looked out. The mountainside was crawling with them, hundreds, maybe more. Ten times the number I would have guessed the town contained. Some, as haggard as the one Lilith just felled, charging up the dirt path at a sprint; some even farther gone scrabbling on all fours straight up the steep mountain slope. A few of the more human specimens carried torches, which pushed back the night and their fellow creatures both, who shrank from the illumination as would any nocturnal beast. All but the most animal of them had weapons – pitchforks, scythes, axes, and the like. And they were all headed this way. In fact, even though I peered out from a narrow slit in a slab of rock meters deep, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, to a one, they were looking at me.

  It occurred to me then where they’d all come from. These weren’t simply the current female occupants of Nevazut. This was all the women who’d ever lived here. Ten generations. Twenty. Robbed of the release of death by a dark master intent on amassing an army on the off chance they’d prove necessary.

  Looking at ’em all, I wasn’t too psyched to be that half-chance.

  “You know what?” I said. “You’re right, let’s get moving. Where to?”

  Lilith gestured down the broad, drafty hall, toward a vast open space with ornate staircases on either side. “Up,” she said, “to Grigori’s study. Our best bet to find out where he’s gone.”

  We ran in silence down the hall and up the stairs. The hall was pale stone, studded everywhere with heads of large game: bear, deer, elk, ram, musk ox. The modern era’s decorative equivalent of Grigori’s favored heads-on-pikes motif, I guessed. As the hall widened into the great room that housed the twin staircases, I saw he had complete specimen trophies as well: elephants and lions and gazelles, all staring at us with lifeless eyes of glass as we sprinted past.

  I took the stairs two at a time, my hand trailing along the wooden banister for balance, each footfall sinking into the heavy pile of a runner the color of blood. One floor. Two. Heavy wooden doors, fixed with hinges and cross-braces of iron, blurred by on either side. Lilith moved so fast ahead of me I could barely see her.

  Somewhere, in the distance, I heard the brittle-bone-snap of old wood splitting. Pictured a door much like these only larger giving in and vampires pouring through like ants out of a mound.

  They were inside.

  We reached the main landing, onto the left- and right-hand side of which the two sets of stairs on either side of the great room connected. I turned and looked behind me, then wished I hadn’t. They’d reached the great room, scrabbling along the floor and walls. I watched, frozen in horror, as they approached. And then I felt Lilith’s iron grip on my elbow, pulling me backward, toward the landing’s largest door, which was centered on the back wall of the room.

  She threw it open, tossed me inside. And then she stepped inside herself, slamming shut the heavy door and dropping into place what sounded in the darkness like a heavy wooden beam, barring entry to anyone or anything outside.

  A lantern flared, bathing the room in amber light.

  An office. Large, drafty, and high-ceilinged, with two slit windows like down below, no glass in either, and a cold, ash-filled fireplace expansive enough for me and five friends to stand inside, provided I actually had five friends, and we all agreed to stoop a little. I worried its chimney was large enough to afford some enterprising vampire entry to the room, and apparently, so did Lilith, because she yanked at a lever to one side of the mantle, and – with a grinding protest of long-immobile iron – closed the flue, for all the good it’d likely do.

  Above the fireplace was an oil painting, four feet by seven or thereabouts. It depicted a smiling Grigori in the foreground. Behind him was the castle in which we stood – blood running from its windows, and heads on pikes all around. Two tapestries hung floor to ceiling in the room, one between the narrow windows, and another on the wall that contained neither door nor fireplace. The former depicted a great war between angels and demons, with nine observers to one side looking on. The latter depicted a great flood.

  In the center of the room was a desk. It was the size of your average aircraft carrier, piled high with books and scrolls and, to my surprise, a sleek desktop computer, the kind that’s all flat-screen and wireless and stuff, with a keyboard and a mouse that aren’t attached. But the computer was tipped over and all smashed up, a small pry bar atop the ruined tech. I guess he didn’t want us checking out his search history or me Googling to find a prospective new vessel. Behind the desk was a tall, ornate chair that looked as if it had been originally intended for a place of worship; it had a tapered back some seven feet high with a peak like a church steeple, and a wooden cross atop it.

  I guess irony wasn’t dead after all.

  I took in the scene, huffing and puffing from my recent sprint up the stairs. My Ricou-bitten shoulder was throbbing like toothache. My scabbed-over trachea had begun oozing blood anew. As I sucked wind, I caught a harsh, boozy note in the chill office air, and noted that the papers on one side of the desk were stained yellow and warped into an undulating, crinkly mess, as if wetted and then dried. Glass shards glinted dully among them, as well as an intact, corked bottle neck, and as I approached to look, I caught a glimpse of something else, on the floor behind the desk; something disgusting. A shriveled, glistening green-brown mess of strange organic matter about the size of a high-end sleeping bag – the kind that looks like a mummy’s wrap, or a cocoon – gone downy white in patches from some sort of fungal infection, its mucoid secretions seeping into the stonework beneath and running weak-tea-brown in the cracks between the flagstones. Beside it was a stack of folded clothes I recognized as Grigori’s. Some feet away there was a small wooden crate, its lid pried open and leaning against one side of it, a mass of straw visible within.

  “Grigori, you naughty man,” said Lili
th, and I thought I caught a note of admiration in her voice. “Ricou wasn’t all you brought back here from the Americas, was he?”

  “Come again?”

  “I know where he’s gone – or, rather, I’ve I good idea how he got there. And more importantly, how you can follow.”

  There was a thud at the door. Two hundred pounds of wood and iron rattled like cheap particleboard. Strong though it was, that door wouldn’t keep them out forever.

  “You mean how we can follow.”

  “No, I don’t. This mode of transportation is inaccessible to those of us who no longer inhabit organic vessels – to the Chosen, to the Fallen, and to me. I suspect that’s why Grigori went to the trouble of procuring it, despite its rarity, expense, and unpleasantness.”

  Another smack against the door, more forceful this time. I heard a groan as the bolts that affixed the metal brackets holding the beam lock in place began to loosen. “Okay,” I said, “you wanna tell me what, exactly, we’re talking about here?”

  “Sure,” she said, plucking an unlabeled, clear glass bottle full of slightly cloudy yellow liquid, in which floated something thumb-sized, curled, and white, from the shipping crate. She held it up for me to see, “you’re going through a wormhole.”

  “You mean like science fiction?”

  Lilith laughed. “No, I fear this is far messier and more magical than that. You’ve heard of the alchemical practice of astral projection, have you not? Remote viewing?”

  “Of course, but I was under the impression the people who were doing it were just tripping their faces off on whatever wacky shit they ingested to induce the state.”

  “Well, you’re half-right. The compounds employed to induce the state are potent, indeed – some of the harshest toxins of the plant and animal world both – and the practice itself has largely become a joke as the old ways died off, only to be halfheartedly revived by latter generations of dilettantes and pretenders with no notion how to harness and focus the incredible power of the tools they yield.”

  “So what is that stuff, then?”

  “This stuff, as you so glibly refer to it, is a staggering work of alchemical art, crafted some four hundred years ago by one of the finest practical magicians this world has ever known. A witch doctor, you might have called him, by the name of Shaddam, who made his home in the swamps of what is now south Florida, and who was burned at the stake by the Spanish during their Inquisition for his crimes against God and nature both.”

  “All very impressive,” I said, impatiently. Then, with worry, as I saw the white something inside the bottle wriggle, “Uh, is that a live worm?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Lilith. “It’s only half of one. And a damn rare half of one at that. I thought this species long since banished from your plane.”

  “Right. Because it being whole is the implausible part. Not the four-hundred-years-old-and-still-alive bit.” I looked at the shards of glass atop the desk. The papers stained from the liquid within. And no sign of any worm, half or otherwise. “Wait – don’t tell me I’ve gotta eat that thing.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “You’re going to drink it. The whole bottle, in fact. Every drop.”

  My stomach fluttered at the very thought of that worm thing sliding down my throat.

  I nodded toward the desk. “Grigori didn’t drink the bottle down.”

  “Grigori’s body courses with centuries of dark magic, and he’s long strengthened himself by feeding on the blood of others. He is no longer entirely human, even if his body is, or near enough. He has no need of the medicinal properties of the tincture in which the worm resides. It is a potent mélange of wormwood and peyote, psilocybin and belladonna, all steeped in pure grain alcohol. Believe me when I tell you, you’re going to want to be drunk for what happens next.”

  “And what happens next?”

  “As I said, this bottle contains but half a worm. The mouth-bearing half, to be precise. The, uh, bottom half is somewhere else. Once you consume it, it will, well, cause you to generate a sac of sorts, much like the one you see at your feet. Its other half will do the same. Within the cocoon, the worm will feed on you, causing your vessel to be digested. Fear not, it derives no sustenance from your meat; what it gleans its energy from is the molecular resonance which anchors you to this particular plane of existence. The creature itself exists across many planes at once, which is why it can be split in two without injury. Once it’s done with you, you will pass, reassembled, like so much refuse from its system. This worm was long used whole to facilitate astral projection, for in its normal feeding cycle, the victim would simply experience wild hallucinations only to awaken precisely where they were they began. But a few dark mages realized its potential for physical transport as well.”

  She handed the bottle to me. I eyed it dubiously. “So I drink this, and then get eaten, and then get shit out someplace else?”

  “The same someplace else as Grigori, one imagines. The bottle, you see, is unlabeled, and if the crate is any indication, one of six – though two more, it seems, are missing, given I’d assume to Drustanus and Yseult – so it’s doubtful they lead to different locations.”

  “What if he – or they – are waiting for me on the other side?”

  “A possibility,” she said. “In which case, I recommend you kill them before they kill you – as is your intent in chasing them anyway. But I doubt they will be.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  She nodded to the mass of organic matter on the floor, which was decaying before our very eyes, and in so doing, releasing a gag-inducing stink that didn’t serve to calm my already mutinous stomach. “Because that,” she said. “And this, remember, is just the mouth-end.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Mind your tongue, Collector. The point is, they’re not likely to stick around at the other end of their makeshift sidereal conduit, not when it could potentially be used to follow them. And anyways, Grigori’s got several hours’ head-start on you, so there’s a chance he and his fellow Brethren’s trail will prove long cold by the time that you arrive.”

  “This plan of yours sounds better by the minute,” I said. “I get eaten by a worm and then maybe ambushed or maybe find the place deserted.”

  “I fear you haven’t any other options at this point, Collector. But take heart, this mode of transport does have its benefits.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “It’s the only way that poor meat-suit of yours gets out of here alive.”

  “And what about you?”

  “Oh, I can take my leave of this place any time I want,” she said, striking a dramatic pose and vanishing, only to reappear a moment later across the room. “But somebody’s got to stay and clean up Grigori’s mess before it spreads beyond this little hamlet to the world at large. These poor women are too far gone to save, but not yet too powerful to kill.”

  “So you get to go all Buffy, and I wind up worm food?”

  Lilith smiled. “My dear Collector, you wound up worm food long ago. Now drink up. You’ve a bad guy to kill.”

  I uncorked the bottle. Watched the grub-looking worm thingy wriggle toward the surface, its front end opening into a four-pointed star of a mouth, exposing a pink interior ringed all around with tiny teeth. Got dizzy from the sight, and from the tincture’s noxious fumes.

  And then, eyes closed, I drank.

  17.

  I downed the contents of the bottle in five quick gulps, draining dry a liter’s worth of booze in seconds, save for the stray rivulets that escaped my lips to run down my chin and neck.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then the bite came, a white-hot stabbing pain inside my stomach.

  Then the office door caved in.

  Then my pores began secreting a resinous brown goo that hardened as it hit the air.

  The vampire women poured inside. Lilith tore them limb from limb with her bare hands – her back to me, ensuring none got to me before I was saf
ely encased.

  I fell to my knees, my head swimming from the booze and God knows what else, my body wracked with jolts of excruciating pain. I tried to scream, but my mouth and nose were filled with resin, so instead my diaphragm spasmed in useless panic. Then my eyes were covered brown, and my world went dark. Suddenly, a vast bluish plane unfolded all around me, dotted with a billion billion points of light. Souls, I realized or was told or always knew: all that are, or were, or ever will be. The whole of human existence, laid out across a thin skein of light. I zoomed backward from it – weightless, bodiless – and that wisp-thin plane became but one whorl in the vast fingerprint of all existence, a single undulating tree-ring in the cross-section of the universe. The other planes were red and green and purple and black and a thousand other colors not yet imagined, or perhaps impossible for our own eyes to discern. And between those planes swam flew floated massive beasts like whales like sharks like snakes like oh my God like giant worms and I was in one I was one I am one I will forever be one and then, as quick as it began, I felt a pain in my stomach that reminded me I had a stomach I felt a tingle in my limbs that reminded me I had limbs I felt an awful burning in my sinuses that reminded me how godawful that rotting worm sac smelled and then I was tumbling twisting falling naked in a slick of amniotic fluid toward a filthy flop-house mattress a massive ruptured cocoon hanging above me and it was cold and damp and dark a basement I thought or a storeroom or a warehouse empty and abandoned and still I fell as if forever but not forever merely seconds and somewhere nearby or faraway both trumpet-loud and whisper-soft a phone was ringing ringing ringing in the dark.

  Dazed and knocked windless, I lay on the mattress spattered with afterworm for seconds or minutes or hours, sanity returning by degrees. I looked around, and realized I was, in fact, in a basement – the wired-glass-windowed, pipe-laden basement of a commercial building, to be more precise. Six mattresses were scattered across the floor, all bare and cheap and worn from use, three others caked brown with fallen gore and sprinkled all around with glinting shards of shattered glass. Above mine and those ones hung cocoons – mine fresh, glistening, and steaming slightly like sweat rising from a body on a cold day, the others downy-white and desiccated to varying degrees. Above the other unused mattresses hung bottles like the one from which I had drunk, rough twine knotted at bottleneck and then around the building’s heavy piping, pale worm-halves swimming around inside.