Old Flames, Burned Hands

by McGregor, Tim

  “Thanks. That’s really kind of you.”

  The officer fixed Tilda with a stern look. “I mean it, Tilda. You’ve been going on adrenaline for the past twelve hours and you’re gonna crash. That’s when the reality of what just happened is going to hit you like a ton of bricks. Don’t be shy about calling when it does, okay?”

  Tilda felt her throat catch at the woman’s earnestness. “I will. Thank you.”

  She lingered a moment before climbing out and retrieving the duffel from the back. She ducked down to wave goodbye. Whittaker lingered until she saw Tilda cross Dundas and thread her way up the narrow street. When Tilda was out of sight, she put the cruiser in gear and pulled away.

  TILDA glanced back over her shoulder. When the police unit was gone, she started running. Winnowing through the maze of alleys and shortcuts to the grey brick with the darkened windows. The hallway was empty, the door to Gil’s flat closed but not locked. Tilda wondered if there were other tenants in the building and, if there were, what they must have made of the intense racket coming from the third floor space earlier when the two coven members had tried to kill her. Ideal neighbours, she thought, the kind that don’t complain even when the undead lay siege to the adjacent flat.

  They might also be dead, she considered. Slaughtered by the coven before they came after her.

  She dug the flashlight from the bag and pushed into the flat. Crunching over a floor of broken glass, she trained the Maglite beam over the shelves, searching through the tangle of bric-a-brac for the one thing she needed. There, at the back of the second shelf, hidden behind a chainsaw.

  The flamethrower.

  Gil’s arts-and-crafts project of incendiary destruction. Some of the black finish had flaked off but it appeared to be undamaged, the tall can of butane still loaded in the frame of a caulking gun. She tried to remember how it worked. The wick extending off the front needed to be lit. The BBQ lighter fused to the carriage clicked uselessly before it fired and lit the wick. She pointed it at the ceiling and squeezed the nozzle. A blast of angry bright flame erupted in a straight six-foot roar of dragon’s breath. The cobwebs drifting from the ceiling sparkled as they burned and smoked into nothing.

  Nasty piece of work. A tiny smile tugged up the corner of her mouth.

  She rifled the shelf for any backup cans of fuel and came away with two fresh rounds to be loaded into the flamethrower. She toggled back the loading arm and unseated the can from the gun and shook it, feeling its weight. A quarter full, maybe less. The thought of having to reload in the midst of those things was unnerving so she tossed the spent can and loaded in one of the spares. Test-firing the fresh supply of pressurized fuel evinced a clean seven-foot blast of fire. Her smile widened at the added distance. The more real estate she could keep between herself and those monsters the better.

  Blowing out the wick, she laid the weapon on the floor and ransacked the shelves for anything else that might be useful. Gil was such an odd packrat that she half-hoped to find a gun amongst all the junk but none appeared. There was, however, a wood-handled machete. The rusty patina mottling the blade only made the thing look cruel and devastating. She tossed it into the duffel bag.

  Clamping a hair elastic in her teeth, she tied her hair back into a tight ponytail to keep it out of her face. She tightened her belt by one notch and then unwound and retied the laces of her shoes to keep them from slipping off if she had to run.

  She prayed it wouldn’t come to a dead run. She didn’t have the knees for it anymore.

  The last bit of business required the duct tape. She tore off strips of it with her teeth and lashed the Maglite to the undercarriage of the flamethrower. The end result wasn’t as snug as she’d hoped but the flashlight held, throwing its beam in whichever direction she aimed the blowtorch.

  The weapon was loaded into the duffel bag along with the extra can of fuel and then zipped closed. Tilda slung the strap over one shoulder, adjusted its weight and then quit the flat.

  THREE blocks north to the building where she and Gil had once dreamed of living. The same building where she had witnessed two young people die at the hands of the coven. Tilda shouldered open the side door and it gave way with a dull scrape. The dim hallway and then the stairs, two flights down to the decrepit boiler room. Nothing had changed since she’d last been here. No yellow police tape left behind, no sign that the police had been here at all. They had ignored her call, probably dismissing her as a crank. Across the room, nestled under an alcove was the door to the tunnels. Its riveted metal surface was laced with cobwebs as if undisturbed for ages.

  She slipped the duffel to the floor and zipped it open. The machete slid under her belt at the small of her back. She lifted the flamethrower out and slung its strap over her shoulder. The Maglite clicked on, shining its powerful beam across the stagnant puddles on the concrete floor. She took out the second butane can but had no place to carry it. The duffel was too bulky to carry through the confined space ahead. She didn’t want it dragging or getting in the way. Scrounging up the duct tape, she tore off two strips and taped the backup can to the one loaded in the frame. It looked kind of badass, she thought, like a double-barrelled flame tosser.

  Two clicks on the lighter and the wick ignited, a bright birthday candle extending from the business end. A test pull on the trigger and flames spewed forth, leaving a sooty mark on the metal door.

  Her hand gripped the handle and the door cracked open with a pop, as if vacuum sealed. The throw of the flashlight lit up a dusty floor and brick walls that inclined overhead in a gentle archway. Beyond that, darkness.

  Tilda blew out her cheeks and tried to slow her heart from rabbit-pounding inside her ribs. It wasn’t too late. She could still turn around and go home. Take the phone from her pocket and dial Whittaker’s number. Explain the whole unexplainable mess.

  Speak now or forever hold.

  Gil was still down there. She could feel that much. Was it worth it?

  Tilda ducked under the low slung lintel and disappeared into the tunnel.

  THERE IS DARK AND THERE IS PITCH. The powerful flashlight cut through fifteen paces of stygian ink but no more. The tunnel ahead was a solid wall of darkness, concealing whatever godless thing slithered within it. The fluttering wick of the flamethrower cast a glow up over the arched ceiling and the stale air was humid and smelled of dirt. Tilda’s jaw ached from clenching her teeth so hard, fighting down the overpowering instinct to get the hell out of this cramped space and sprint back the way she came.

  The tunnel went on and on. A straight path with no exits or deviations but Tilda still couldn’t shake the sensation of getting lost, as if each step diminished her chances of ever finding her way out again.

  Go back. Give up. He’s dead anyway.

  Just

  fucking

  RUN

  Then the darkness expanded up ahead as the tunnel bisected another channel. Tilda inched forward, straining her ears to hear anything beyond the crunch of her own heels on the grit floor. Nothing.

  This second tunnel cut perpendicular to the one she travelled. Aiming the light to her left and then her right revealed nothing but more tunnel and three options. Port, starboard or straight ahead. There was no sound to indicate which path lead to the coven but a bad smell wafted up around her. She sniffed at it, found the stench venting in from the tunnel on her left and followed it.

  Ten paces on and the grade of the floor dipped, angling deeper underground and the smell growing stronger along with the descent. A foul rank somewhere between sewer gas and something dead left out to rot. It left little doubt that she was on the right path.

  Up ahead in the darkness, something moved. Tilda froze and sighted the beam on a pale mass flopping across the floor. It reared its head at her, revealing two milky pupil-less eyes. The thing flopped and jerked like a landlocked seal and it took Tilda a moment to make out what she was seeing. The vampire had no legs, just bloodied stumps that scissored uselessly behind it. The left arm was c
hewed off at the elbow and the thing clawed the floor with its one remaining arm, pulling itself along with an obscene flopping motion.

  To her horror, she recognized this dismembered member of the coven. The same one that had attacked her at Gil’s flat only to hurl itself through the window sans arm. The vampire clawed the air as she approached but it posed little immediate threat being little more than a torso. How had it ended up in this state? A fresh wave of horror came when she hazarded that the thing had been punished. It had fled back to the coven, bringing news of Gil’s betrayal and her existence before leading the others to the house. The creature had been punished for letting Gil escape. Stripped of its robes and crippled with a double amputation, the revolting thing was left to slither off on its own. When it snarled, she could see its maw of broken teeth. It had been defanged.

  If the cabal of monsters had done this to its own loyal acolyte, what would it do a Judas like Gil?

  The pale thing snatched at her foot, raking its nails on the cold floor. Tilda aimed the flamethrower at the creature but then turned it aside. She didn’t want to alert the others to her presence in their lair by torching this one. She slid the machete from her belt and wound back, bringing the rusty blade down on the flopping leech. Its neck cleaved open, the blade chinking on the bone, and dark blood spilled foul into the dirt. It shrieked and Tilda swung again, cutting its cries short. The head thumped to the stone and the shorn legs jittered in a spastic running motion, as if it sought to outrun its own demise.

  Tilda looked at the bloodied machete in her hand, surprised at her own handiwork. Two days ago she would have been sickened at what she had just done but now she felt nothing. At most a residual hatred for the abomination at her feet. Pressing the flat of the blade against the dead thing’s ribs, she wiped the machete clean and slid it back into her belt. Then she went on, moving down the gentle grade of the tunnel and further into the damp earth.

  THE rancid stench grew stronger the further down she travelled until the tunnel came to an abrupt end. The arched ceiling opened up into a low slung space not much wider than the tunnel that fed into it. No exit, no corresponding tunnel. Old ironwork machinery rusted in a heap to her left and dusty oil drums tilted in the grit to her right. Coils of cable and rotten crates cast about. Condensation beaded off the brick wall and a musty fungal smell assaulted her nose.

  Nothing more. She had taken the wrong path. Tilda cursed, ready to double back but then she stopped to scan the room one more time. Why was the stink of the coven so strong here, the temperature so cold? She stepped over a twisted length of trestle and swept the beam of light over the walls.

  Hidden behind one of the oil drums was a hole in the brick, dark like an open wound in the earth itself. She knelt before it and felt a draught of air wash over her, the stench coming from the breach in the wall. Cobwebs wafted on the foul breeze.

  They were down the hole, she realized, and backed away. The dark breach in the brick was no more than three feet in diameter. She’d have to crawl through.

  No way in hell was she going to crawl inside that foul darkness.

  Training the lightbeam into the aperture revealed nothing. A sucking black hole from which nothing returned. Tilda set her knees against the cold floor and dropped her chin to her clavicle. It was too much. Too far, too fucking frightening. She had tried. She was already drafting an epistolary apology to Gil for abandoning him.

  “I can’t do it,” she whispered.

  Fix it, said the grating little voice that never slept. Fix it.

  She inched forward on her hands and knees to the opening. Three deep gasps and then she held her breath, as if bracing for a dive into cold water, and crawled in.

  The space was tight, scraping down on her back and pressing in against her arms. Dust and filth rained down from the ceiling of the confined space, into her hair and sticking to the sweat on the back of her neck. The beam of the flashlight bounced and flared but showed nothing, its light simply eaten up by the darkness. Her heart jackhammered against the raw terror of becoming stuck in this suffocating tomb and she wanted to scream but then her fingers latched onto an edge.

  The burrowed passage ended at a lip and she shimmied through, tumbling out of the canal like some ashen newborn birthed into a world of darkness.

  Tilda grunted as she hit something hard and slid down a slope until she crashed against what felt like a bed of dry sticks. A rustle and crack as she hauled herself upright, the slur of dry wood crunching around her. Sweeping the light down, she saw that the rustle was not kindling but bones. Dry and brittle, splintering against her weight. The entire floor of was a field of dry bones, picked clean and left to petrify in the dark in some hidden ossuary. Thousands of them.

  She scrambled to get out, to find some patch of dry land where her feet didn’t slur the tinkling bones under her. A ledge appeared before her where the floor rose up and Tilda vaulted out of the pit onto solid ground.

  She strained her ears but the only sound was that of dripping water. Casting the throw of the flashlight revealed the floor, a mosaic inlaid into stone and barely visible under the grit and soot. Columns rose up, vaulting overhead where they vanished in the darkness. All else was pitch where the maglite could not penetrate. The space was big and cavernous and, Tilda shuddered, it felt like a church.

  She moved past a column, the crunch of her shoes on the grit too loud by far. The stench so strong it made her eyes water. Something wet dripped onto the crown of her head and Tilda swung the light up.

  The coven hung above her. Suspended upside down, their wretched faces flaring in the lightbeam.

  And all at once, their eyes opened.

  The faces twisted up in hatred. Their lamprey mouths of teeth hissed and the first one dropped, opening its arms to receive her.

  Tilda pulled the trigger and blasted fire into its face and it went up like a torch. It hit the ground and shrieked and rolled as it burned. Another flew at her. She throttled back and fired.

  A second vampire went down in a roil of flames and a third knocked Tilda sideways before being immolated at point blank range. It bolted away as if it could outrun the flames, a fireball on two legs, and collided into its brothers and they too were swatting at the fire that licked at their mildewed rags and kicked their burning frère away.

  Nails ripped down Tilda’s shoulder and she blasted another and kept the pressure on, torching everything within range and the shrieking of the burning monsters overpowered the roar of the flamethrower. The coven withdrew, backing away from the flames in a gallery of hissing faces and popping teeth. Four carcasses flopped as they burned until they stilled and now a quartet of bonfires pushed back the darkness of the coven’s lair.

  All but one of the creatures retreated. The tall rector of this coven of monsters stood his ground and fixed Tilda with pupil-less eyes of molten hatred.

  Tilda swept the weapon to his direction but toggled back the flames and met his stare. “Where is he?”

  The rector didn’t move, didn’t blink.

  Gil had said that most of these monsters were so old they didn’t speak anymore, communicating in some non-verbal way. It was possible that this tyrant didn’t understand a word she’d said. Still, how could it mistake her demands? She triggered a blast of flame and barked again. “Where’s Gil?”

  The rector swiveled its grotesque head a quarter turn to the right. The wall of gibbering and bobbing vampires parted like gates opening and something took shape in the new light of the burning bodies.

  He was lashed to a column. Head down and drenched in so much blood that he looked painted. The flesh of his chest and arms were scored with wounds and wet flaps of skin hung loose, exposing muscle tissue and bone to the stale air. Iron spikes had been driven through Gil’s palms, crucifying him to the stone pillar.

  Her stomach dropped at the sight, knees threatening to buckle under her. What had they done to him? The filthy things had strung him up like a piece of meat and flayed him alive. She was too
late.

  “Cut him down.”

  No one moved.

  Tilda snapped the flamethrower up and torched the nearest creature. It screamed and tried to hide behind its brothers but they kicked it away and Tilda kept the pressure on until the thing blazed up and fell over.

  “Cut him down!”

  The tyrant dipped his chin in a slight nod. The coven members shambled over Gil and cut away the thick rope from his ankles and plucked free the iron from his palms. Gil tumbled down and flopped onto his belly and lay as still as a corpse in a lye dusted trench.

  Tilda poured on the flames, driving them away from the prone figure on the floor. The filth gnashed their teeth in retreat. She knelt over Gil and rolled him onto his back, her hands coming away slick and red. His eyes were open but there was no pupil, no fixed point. His ribs were still, no faint rise or fall.

  Oxygen rushed out of the space and the only sound was the pop and crack of the bonfires. Tilda smoothed the hair out of his eyes and bent close to his ear. She told him that he couldn’t go, that he had to come back to her. Now.

  The body jerked under her and a wet rattle issued from his throat. Gil’s pupils dropped and swam drunkenly, clicking an f-stop against her features. Tilda clutched him, as if she could stop him from slipping away again.

  His voicebox cracked. “Til?”

  “I’m here.” She pulled him up. “I’m here.”

  His eyes reeled, trying to comprehend what he was seeing, where he was. The underground nest and the perverse figures shuffling around them. Tilda smack in the middle of the coven, fifty-two feet below the surface. Also out of place were the bonfires blazing around them, casting warmth into a place where light never touched.

  He gripped her arm, smearing blood over her skin. “How did you get here?”

  “Get up,” she said.

  “I don’t think I can stand.”

  “Yes you can.” She hooked an arm under him and lifted. “Get up now.”