The Dark Messenger

by Milo Spires

  ‘Okay, so I’m sending you a message, I think,’ Regina thought. ‘I'm thinking about your funny-shaped bum in that dress, because it’s stuffed up close to my face.’ She paused for a second before saying aloud, ‘Did you get anything?’

  ‘Nope, nothing. I felt nothing,’ Becky grumbled, disappointed. ‘Damn! I was really was hoping that we could speak to each other that way. I mean, that would be so cool! I could throw my mobile away and not have to pay next month’s line rental too.’

  Both of them burst out laughing.

  Suddenly there was a noise down at the end of the tunnel from where they’d just entered. They froze into silence, hoping that their ears had been lying to them. But it came again, and there was no mistaking it. Something was quietly moving around in the room that they had just been in.

  Regina tapped Becky’s leg and whispered, ‘Shush! Don’t move!’

  The dogs growled, and Regina knew there was nothing she could do about them. Poor Solomon and Bruce wanted like hell to kill them, but were jammed in just as tightly as the women were. She feared the worst, and the worst came.

  The quiet movements they had heard, suddenly turned into a massive noise as someone grabbed the heavy old steel door and threw it out of the way. A nasty, evil voice then echoed down the tunnel towards them:

  ‘I SEE YOU.’

  Chapter 36 – Liar

  Mietioc’s memory had finally come back to him, and although Hoidrious had said he knew nothing about the ambush that had killed him and the Elite warriors, Mietioc now knew undoubtedly that he was lying.

  Hoidrious and Angus had known each other, and very well too. They had always kept their business relationship top secret though. It was so clandestine in fact that, for over a thousand years, only two of Hoidrious’ most loyal guards were ever told about it. These were Loicheonk and Marchilla, two 7-foot-tall vampires who went everywhere with him.

  In the cells, even though they were masked at all times, Longinus knew who they were and also knew their names too. Only through his flippant attitude did he choose to refer to them at all times as, the goons.

  Apart from protecting Hoidrious, the goons Loicheonk and Marchilla’s duties, involved their tasting his food to reduce the chance of poisoning; and, like bodyguards for the president, if ever an assassination attempt was made, they had to be willing to take a hit for him. So far they had never, in well over fifteen hundred years, witnessed any kind of attack. They hoped they would one day, because they felt confident in their beliefs that they were the strongest and most formidable warriors to exist. They believed no one could harm them. They even thought the elite warriors with their, We bang our chests together, and sharpen our swords daily attitudes, were pathetic in comparison.

  Throughout the war, which Hoidrious as Rex’s lap dog was never allowed to question, he still chatted with Angus on a regular basis. On the face of it, this would seem bizarre, considering the fact that it was his coven that had been fighting the Scots.

  Rex on the back of a lie, had orchestrated the whole thing, and had never admitted that his true intention for being there was simple; that he wanted their riches for himself. It didn’t pan out for him though, because after so much time devoted to the war, he was forced to give in. The passageways beneath Angus’ castle were too claustrophobic for battle purposes, and the numbers of his dead warriors kept rising.

  Rex wouldn’t have cared, but grave reports were coming back in from the battlefield, suggesting his warriors were growing suspicious of his intentions. It was being spread around, that their battles and deaths, were only so that Rex could feather his own nest.

  Then, with Captain Ognian and a few others, reporting that a revolution seemed imminent and, in their view was almost unavoidable, Rex had grudgingly commanded that they all stand down and return home. He spent the next decade with his tail between his legs, suffering from deep shame.

  Now a thousand years had passed since his embarrassing defeat, and even after all this time, both of the covens, still harboured unfathomable levels of bitter hatred towards one another.

  It was for this reason that Hoidrious chose to keep hush hush about his business relationship with the Scot leader. He feared that his own coven members and Rex wouldn’t understand that it was for their own benefit he kept a channel open with the enemy. He knew they would neither accept it, nor deliberate before finding him guilty of treason if they ever heard. Then, as mayhem kicked off in the coven, Rex would be forced to deal an ignominious torture upon him. Afterwards, if he could still breathe, and his limbs were intact and bending in the right directions, he knew that they would all demand that he be expelled from their walls, leaving him alone in the big world with no one to care for him.

  Personality-wise, Hoidrious knew he was a deeply coven kinda guy, and the thought of him being stuck in solitude for an eternity without company, made him shudder. He believed that, apart from sending him over the edge, this abandonment would lead to his own deeply tragic and piteous demise. He also thought if he was ever thrown out, there would be no chance that a vampire of his age, with such a deep black stain on his CV, could ever find another coven that would be willing to accept him. His name would be laughed at or, worse, spat upon, and he would be considered to be thereafter like a vile stench, a cretinous being, and the worst to ever have existed within their covens community.

  The whole thing would be such a desperately sad moment in his existence, that he could see it leading onwards to a deep level of anxiety and depression. Then, with an abundance of anti-depressants being taken to calm the pain, and gallons of gasoline consumed afterwards, to wash them down with, he believed that insanity would demand he concluded the deal by swallowing a match.

  Regardless of the possible punishments though, he still refused to cut his ties with Angus, because he believed the benefits outweighed the risks. The Scot had a plethora of business contacts in the north, and those were important connections for Hoidrious to keep hold of. Plus, up in that castle of his by Holyrood Park, the Scot had books with so much evil in them that even Satan could learn a thing or two—if he ever cared to stop by for a coffee and a browse, that is.

  Angus hated Rex, and with Hoidrious, together, they had tried to have him assassinated at different times in history. Angus kept Hoidrious’ name out of it for obvious reasons.

  Then using a messenger for deniability purposes, one time, he had even approached a friend of Rex’s, a vampire named Brius, to see if he might be interested in slicing the fucker’s head off.

  Brius’ reputation for being a true friend was often thwarted by the stories of him killing his own parents for some extra coin. So when he was approached in the dark cobbled streets of Edinburgh, with just one Victorian street lamp shining gloomily, he proved his true colours. The Irish vampire was offered a mountain of shiny gold pieces, which he pounced on immediately. His reply and acceptance of the executioner role, with half the gold being paid up front, had proved that Angus’ presumptions, being that he would turn on his friend, hadn’t been wrong.

  Brius had the nickname from then on, as ‘the slithery little toad’.

  Unfortunately, the moniker didn’t last long though; sadly, his valiant efforts failed him abysmally, and with them his dreams for an eternal life too.

  Rex, the cunning little ass-wipe, who must be seemingly protected by a guardian angel or something, for by the skin of his teeth, again he managed to evade the death sentence that had been hanging around his cretinous neck for years. Brius, however, who was always quoting ‘It’s the luck of the Irish’ every time some good fortune had landed his way, found this time that his good luck charm didn’t come to his rescue, but instead, it ran the other way. The last of a long line of Cluckunic clan from Ireland came to a swift and brutal end as Rex beheaded him.

  Then, with fury rushing through his veins, Rex took to eradicating all known landmarks of Brius’ family. The palace and all its history; one of the oldest in the region was tragically burnt to the ground. Its anc
ient ivy-covered walls, beautifully adorned with the most divine masonic sculptures, fell to the flame, eradicating a landmark that had dated back to well before the sun god, King Louis XIV’s reign over France.

  This action, was Rex’s furious, and half-drunk, wine-soaked reply to anyone else who might be watching, that he had again, slithered his way out of being killed. He hoped that they were utterly horrified by it and had learned a lesson. If that didn’t convince them though, then his cutting out of Vius’ eye, he was sure to have horrified them all to the point, where they would be puking all over themselves, wherever the cowardly worms were hiding.

  -----------------

  For all his existence to date, Hoidrious had strong beliefs that vampires shouldn’t be the ones to hide in the shadows, and that his species was above humans in every way. For two thousand years or more, all he had ever wanted, was to see his kind coming out from the shadows, and then to rage a vicious war against humanity. The result obviously being that they would become triumphant over the weaker humans, and then rule the planet from there on, instead of being like caged dogs living deep underground. He strongly believed that the humans should be doing what he thought they were designed to do: feeding the master race with blood.

  Throughout his time as number two in the coven, a role that he had assumed from the time they had done Christ in with the spear, things for him had been okay, but far from perfect. Rex had been his boss when they were Romans, and then he had continued in that position for 2000 years or more. Frankly, Hoidrious was getting tired of not having full command. To be number two for him, was like missing out on the The President of America job, and simply landing the Vice President’s role. It had utterly pained him.

  But after all of the sporadic assassination attempts, and Rex’s reaction to the last one, there had been a period of a hundred years or so where his growing need to become number one in the coven had fallen dormant, like a terrorist sleeper cell.

  Then one day, as he was provoked by Rex’s actions, he snapped. His fury and unreasonableness were quite like a terrorist sleeper cells, having just awoken from a deep sleep. Now the urgency and passion for having the number one position was freshly kickstarted in his mind, and killing Rex was all he could think of. Only this time it was no joke how he felt, and he was adamant that he was going to achieve it. He even came up with a perfect way to cause a revolution in their coven and with it, predicted that Rex would be ousted from power, and soon afterwards would receive ignominious tortures of a deeply beheading kind.

  Then, if when a vote was held, the beheading was not granted by popular opinion, he would insist on being the one with the damn whip, and it would be a hundred lashes for Rex, and not a mere sixty, as he’d received.

  What had exactly brought Hoidrious out of his dormant state, was this:

  There had been a meeting called in the coven, and the huge room was filled to capacity. Everything had been going great, and there had been many executions, which was always good entertainment. There had been so many in fact, that blood was in abundance everywhere. It had been dripping down off the walls, and the guards were covered in it. Brutally amputated limbs had found themselves centre stage in tug of war competitions. It had been great, and a really joyous occasion for all.

  Then Rex had mentioned the horrible weather outside, whilst they were standing on their ledges, and he had slipped a comment about, not to worry because he had the undeniable cure. Some silver sword, and an idea that he had wanted to keep hush-hush for a while, something about releasing werewolves across the planet to save the Earth from destruction.

  At that moment Hoidrious had realised that he was thinking about taking over the world, but not with vampires as he would have liked, but with the howling beasts that they had all very nearly succumbed to themselves in the great war.

  Hoidrious had quickly dived in and interrupted Rex, saying he had thought it would be better to forget the fluffy beasts, and much better to order a worldwide vampire attack on humanity.

  Rex went mad.

  He had been grinning down at a human who had just had his throat slit wide open, and as Hoidrious’ words ricochet’d around in the old fuckers brain, their meaning caused the most disastrous of effects.

  Rex had spun around in front of a packed house, and then leapt across to the same ledge that Hoidrious was on, before hurling foul abuse at him.

  ‘Are you stupid or something?’ Rex had bellowed. ‘Don’t you realise that the equilibrium balance would be shattered by doing that? Do you actually want our species to succumb to a quick and lethal end?’

  Hoidrious had absolutely no idea what the guy was on about. Equilibrium balance? His immediate reaction being, that he had only been able to stare, thinking that Rex had finally lost it in a big way. It had been hard to hold in and suppress his desperate need to laugh. Struggling deeply to resist. Somehow he managed to though, and just stood glum-faced, and listening.

  The tension between them at that moment had been tangible to say the least. All of the two hundred vampires in the room had dropped their savagely torn limbs, and pints of blood to stare at them. Hoidrious had felt like he was suddenly on the spot, and was seriously embarrassed. This had been very uncomfortable, and hardly a way for him to feel around his subordinates, especially considering he was their second in command.

  Rex had had rivers of spittle coming out of his mouth and his eyes had glazed over for a time, but after realising he had caused a scene, he allowed himself to relax. Then he had apologised profusely to the room at large for his outburst, before proceeding to explain himself in greater detail.

  After bringing the crowd up to speed on the reasons for his sudden rant, but keeping his own plans about the silver sword and werewolves hush-hush for now, Rex then went on to explain why the age-old rule of never being seen when attacking a human, was so important.

  Whilst he spoke, two human males in their mid-twenties, who were lying sliced and diced, and deeply terror-stricken on the ground, looked up at him agog. For all intents and purposes, they had really needed to be torn apart so they could die more quickly. However, whilst Rex had spoke, no one dared to continue with the festivities, and by the time he had finished, the lucky fuckers had escaped anymore pain, by dying of shock.

  Then moments later, Rex had cleared his throat by launching a massive swell of rotten black phlegm across the cavernous room, before leading on to say that vampires must always stay hiding in the shadows and that they should never rule the Earth. He explained as he had held his finger pointing up towards the rock ceiling above him, that it was for the Humans to be walking around in the sunshine, and for vampires to stay in the shadows.

  He then explained as he pointed down to the hoards of dead humans laying in pieces around the room, that when they die, their souls either go up to those winged fuckers, or if they have been bad, down to their master in Hell.

  The crowds had nodded, accepting this information as he continued.

  Then he reasoned that if vampires did rule the Earth, although the thought sounded somewhat appealing, it would upset the equilibrium balance of the planet, and ultimately lead to their own species extinction. Not to mention without the humans breeding freely, there would be far less souls being sent down, and their master Satan, as a result, would then be undeniably furious.

  Again there was a wave of nodding, as they all, except one, accepted his words of reasoning.

  He then led on and told them that the age old rule had been created by Satan himself and for this rule to be broken without the prince of darknesses permission, then when he heard about it, it would surely enrage him to some unbelievable level, leaving the entire species succumbing to his wrath. He defined his statement as meaning, the eternity they had all enjoyed for thousands of years, could potentially come to an untimely, and most abrupt end.

  Then he had paused, feeling he had said enough as he hoped to get back into killing a few more humans. Only Hoidrious had his own views and feeling somewhat complacent in
his mind with the personal belief that he was completely untouchable, then found him self not checking his tongue, whereas he should have.

  ‘Where is your proof Satan made this rule?’ he had said, as the crowds started whispering behind him, with regards to his testing Rex’s information.

  In response Rex suggested to Hoidrious with an evil scowl across his face, that he should consider the manner in which he was clearly questioning him. Then he continued and grinned at the crowds before informing them all, how he had come about the information.