“Start moving toward the gate,” the guy with the bullhorn said. “We’re going to get you.”
He sounded confident, and their setup indicated a good deal of planning and equipment, like they had done this before, but I still wasn’t too enthusiastic about moving toward a mob of mindless cannibals. I took a few slow steps, and again, the zombies moved toward me. But then we all heard the gate rattle as it slid to one side.
Again, the zombies were confused, and many at the back turned toward the gate. I took a few more steps, and then a crowd of about twenty people came rushing out from the gate. Like the guy on the cherry picker, they seemed pretty disciplined and organized, letting out a loud “Arrrrrr!” as they charged the zombies. They looked like the crazy postapocalyptic bikers and villagers in The Road Warrior movie, all decked out with various kinds of impromptu armor—football pads, paintball and fencing masks, pieces of tires cut up and bound to their arms and legs as armor, hubcaps and garbage can lids for shields. They crashed into the zombies, wielding bats, clubs, machetes, axes, shovels—any hand-to-hand weapon that could deal a fatal blow to the head.
The zombies were now completely confused, and they began to fall back before the assault. I was impressed and grateful for the people’s bravery, but I didn’t see how they stood a chance of clearing a path.
Up on the cherry pickers, the two people who were not on the machine guns were swinging things at the end of a rope, the way you would a sling, but the objects were bigger, so they were using both arms, like in a hammer throw. “Set!” the guy on the bullhorn commanded, and they let go of their projectiles, which flew over the crowd and crashed down slightly in front of me, one to either side. When they hit the ground, I heard loud popping and then splashing sounds. I wasn’t sure, but I started to catch on, so I stopped and took a couple steps back.
The people who had thrown the objects were now wielding bows with flaming arrows, and from where I was standing, it looked like they were aimed right at me. I also got a whiff of something I hadn’t smelled in years, that smell you always associated with summer evenings, when Dad went out and lit the Kingsford in the backyard. I kept backing up as the zombies again advanced on me.
“Fire!” came the command from the guy on the cherry picker, and the arrows shot into the zombie crowd right in front of me on either side. I ducked down, brought my right arm across my face, and hoped these people knew what they were doing.
When the arrows hit and ignited the lighter fluid, the hair on the back of my hand singed and curled in the heat and blast of the expanding fireball. Unlike the zombies, I needed to breathe, and I staggered back a step to catch my breath as the flames receded slightly after the initial flare-up. The people in the cherry pickers pressed the attack, throwing another pair of fuel bombs, redoubling the flames and driving me another step back.
Just a few feet closer to the centers of the two conflagrations, the zombies were faring much worse than I. With their dried-up flesh and hair, most of them were burning briskly, and their moaning now turned to screams as they flailed about in whatever it was they experienced as pain. It smelled like a cross between a barbecue and the seventh circle of hell.
Though horribly burned, many of them were still capable of motion, with their limbs still moving, even though scorched bones could now be seen through their burned clothes and flesh. But even the more hardy ones were losing their struggle to carry on the fight, as their eyelids had shriveled up in the first blast of flame, and their eyeballs looked like singed marshmallows, with sizzling goo running down their dried, cracked cheeks. They would walk into one another, or collapse to their knees, their burning hands clutching their faces in a slow agony that looked appallingly like a final supplication to the God who had made them, punished them, and was now punishing them again.
Between the edges of the two puddles of burning fuel, there were only a few zombies who had completely escaped the flames. I started walking toward them, as this was the gap in the midst of the two burning mobs that led to the gates. The first zombie to get close to me I shot in the face; then I kicked him in the stomach and sent him crashing into the burning zombies to my right. Unfortunately, another burning one grabbed my gun arm and lunged for it with its mouth. I twisted away as I drove my knife into its mouth. It flailed around, still burning, with the tip of my knife stuck in the back of its throat. I wrestled my right arm out of its grip and stuck the barrel in its left eye. I fired as I pulled my knife out, and the zombie fell back into the burning crowd.
This altercation had slowed me down, and two more were closing in: one from my left and the other right in front of me. The one on my left was horribly cadaverous, even by zombie standards. It had been a very old woman before its death, and from the look of its torso, it had been run over and crushed by some large vehicle since then. It couldn’t move its arms. All its bones were crushed, so its two limbs just hung at its sides, swaying randomly as it walked. Its dress was torn, revealing the shriveled, dried flesh underneath, crisscrossed with feathery lines of dried blood and caked with dirt. Its insatiable maw kept coming nevertheless, and would keep on doing so no matter what.
The one in front of me, on the other hand, was a fairly robust male, with just the typical neck wound and bloodstain down his shirt. I leveled the Glock at him and fired, sending him falling back into another zombie behind him. At almost the same time, I slashed the old zombie’s throat as hard as I could with the serrated back edge of my knife. The blow spun her around and dropped her, with her neck severed almost all the way to the spine. She landed on her face, but her head bounced up and twisted around so she was looking completely backward, up at me, before the head flopped back down on its side.
Even then, she started to pull her knees up under herself and struggle to rise. She’d be able to get up, doubtless, but not before I got out of there.
There were just a few more zombies between me and the people who had come out from the gates. I kept moving, but the zombie that the robust male had fallen on was getting up, just as another was coming at me from the right. I kicked the rising one in the head as I shot the standing one in the face. I was just a few feet now from rescue, when something grabbed my left wrist.
I turned and raised the Glock, but saw that I was aiming too high. I was held by something less than four feet tall, what had been a little boy of six or seven. Its jugular was torn open on the left side, but there were no other marks on it. It was slowly bending its mouth toward my wrist, ignoring any danger I might pose in its obsession for human flesh, its only remaining goal or desire. I raised my left arm, lifting the child zombie off the ground even as it continued craning its neck, its bared teeth yearning for my arm.
Oddly enough, the color of this zombie’s flesh was like that of milk, like all his blood had drained out when he died, but had not been replaced with the horrible putrefaction and discoloration that inevitably accompanied undeath, instead leaving him pristine and undefiled. Here was flesh without blood, but also flesh without decay. It was animal existence at its purest—deadly, unholy, and unstoppable.
I holstered the Glock and grabbed the horrible, beautiful thing by the throat as I wrenched my left arm free of its grip. I sheathed the knife and held the thing with both hands around its neck. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I could’ve throttled it to end its eternally pitiable existence, letting it slip slowly into a merciful death, but zombie physiology wouldn’t allow this. It didn’t help that this thing in my hands was the same age as my youngest son last year. The only minuscule consolation was that he didn’t look at me, but up at the sky, unblinking even though he stared right at the sun, his jaw still working in his hellish, animal hunger.
“Sorry” fell so far short of what was going on here and what I was feeling that I wasn’t going to bother with it this time. “Damn you,” I whispered instead, and I flung the little thing away from me and back into the flames. Damn who? The zombie? Me? God? The asshole who invented the disease that caused the dead to rise? What t
he hell? It looked like there was plenty of damnation to go around, so why not just damn us all together, Lord, in one big mass of suffering, with you as the King of it all? Unlike earlier that day, this time I really did feel nauseous.
Two of the people from the gate had reached me by this point. “Come on,” one shouted, grabbing me by the shoulder, “let’s get inside.” I followed them dumbly through the gate as it rattled closed behind us.
ANNE RICE
(1941–)
Named Howard Allen O’Brien at birth, Anne Rice was born in New Orleans, where she and her sister, Alice, spent much of their childhood. Named after her father, Howard, she chose the name Anne when she began to go to school. After the family moved to Texas, she attended two Texas colleges but earned her BA at San Francisco State University when she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1962. Her husband, the poet Stan Rice, would later become a faculty member at the university. Her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, was written in 1973 and published in 1976. The novel’s enormous success inspired the Vampire Chronicles series, which included The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned (1988), The Vampire Armand (1998), Merrick (2000), Blackwood Farm (2002), and Blood Canticle (2003). Additional novels include The Witching Hour (1990), Lasher (1993), Taltos (1994), Exit to Eden (1985), and Belinda (1986), which was published under the pseudonym Anne Rampling.
The Master of Rampling Gate
(1984)
Spring 1888 Rampling Gate. It was so real to us in the old pictures, rising like a fairy-tale castle out of its own dark wood. A wilderness of gables and chimneys between those two immense towers, grey stone walls mantled in ivy, mullioned windows reflecting the drifting clouds.
But why had Father never taken us there? And why, on his deathbed, had he told my brother that Rampling Gate must be torn down, stone by stone? “I should have done it, Richard,” he said. “But I was born in that house, as my father was, and his father before him. You must do it now, Richard. It has no claim on you. Tear it down.”
Was it any wonder that not two months after Father’s passing, Richard and I were on the noon train headed south for the mysterious mansion that had stood upon the rise above the village of Rampling for four hundred years? Surely Father would have understood. How could we destroy the old place when we had never seen it?
But, as the train moved slowly through the outskirts of London I can’t say we were very sure of ourselves, no matter how curious and excited we were.
Richard had just finished four years at Oxford. Two whirlwind social seasons in London had proved me something of a shy success. I still preferred scribbling poems and stories in my room to dancing the night away, but I’d kept that a good secret. And though we had lost our mother when we were little, Father had given us the best of everything. Now the carefree years were ended. We had to be independent and wise.
The evening before, we had pored over all the old pictures of Rampling Gate, recalling in hushed, tentative voices the night Father had taken those pictures down from the walls.
I couldn’t have been more than six and Richard eight when it happened, yet we remembered well the strange incident in Victoria Station that had precipitated Father’s uncharacteristic rage. We had gone there after supper to say farewell to a school friend of Richard’s, and Father had caught a glimpse, quite unexpectedly, of a young man at the lighted window of an incoming train. I could remember the young man’s face clearly to this day: remarkably handsome, with a head of lustrous brown hair, his large black eyes regarding Father with the saddest expression as Father drew back. “Unspeakable horror!” Father had whispered. Richard and I had been too amazed to speak a word.
Later that night, Father and Mother quarrelled, and we crept out of our rooms to listen on the stairs.
“That he should dare to come to London!” Father said over and over. “Is it not enough for him to be the undisputed master of Rampling Gate?”
How we puzzled over it as little ones! Who was this stranger, and how could he be master of a house that belonged to our father, a house that had been left in the care of an old, blind housekeeper for years?
But now after looking at the pictures again, it was too dreadful to think of Father’s exhortation. And too exhilarating to think of the house itself. I’d packed my manuscripts, for—who knew?—maybe in that melancholy and exquisite setting I’d find exactly the inspiration I needed for the story I’d been writing in my head.
Yet there was something almost illicit about the excitement I felt. I saw in my mind’s eye the pale young man again, with his black greatcoat and red woollen cravat. Like bone china, his complexion had been. Strange to remember so vividly. And I realized now that in those few remarkable moments, he had created for me an ideal of masculine beauty that I had never questioned since. But Father had been so angry. I felt an unmistakable pang of guilt.
It was late afternoon when the old trap carried us up the gentle slope from the little railway station and we had our first real look at the house. The sky had paled to a deep rose hue beyond a bank of softly gilded clouds, and the last rays of the sun struck the uppermost panes of the leaded windows and filled them with solid gold.
“Oh, but it’s too majestic,” I whispered, “too like a great cathedral, and to think that it belongs to us!”
Richard gave me the smallest kiss on the cheek.
I wanted with all my heart to jump down from the trap and draw near on foot, letting those towers slowly grow larger and larger above me, but our old horse was gaining speed.
When we reached the massive front door Richard and I were spirited into the great hall by the tiny figure of the blind housekeeper Mrs. Blessington, our footfalls echoing loudly on the marble tile, and our eyes dazzled by the dusty shafts of light that fell on the long oak table and its heavily carved chairs, on the sombre tapestries that stirred ever so slightly against the soaring walls.
“Richard, it is an enchanted place!” I cried, unable to contain myself.
Mrs. Blessington laughed gaily, her dry hand closing tightly on mine.
We found our bedchambers well aired, with snow-white linen on the beds and fires blazing cosily on the hearths. The small, diamond-paned windows opened on a glorious view of the lake and the oaks that enclosed it and the few scattered lights that marked the village beyond.
That night we laughed like children as we supped at the great oak table, our candles giving only a feeble light. And afterward we had a fierce battle of pocket billiards in the game room and a little too much brandy, I fear.
It was just before I went to bed that I asked Mrs. Blessington if there had been anyone in this house since my father left it, years before.
“No, my dear,” she said quickly, fluffing the feather pillows. “When your father went away to Oxford, he never came back.”
“There was never a young intruder after that? . . .” I pressed her, though in truth I had little appetite for anything that would disturb the happiness I felt. How I loved the Spartan cleanliness of this bedchamber, the walls bare of paper and ornament, the high lustre of the walnutpanelled bed.
“A young intruder?” With an unerring certainty about her surroundings, she lifted the poker and stirred the fire. “No, dear. Whatever made you think there was?”
“Are there no ghost stories, Mrs. Blessington?” I asked suddenly, startling myself. Unspeakable horror. But what was I thinking—that that young man had not been real?
“Oh, no, darling,” she said, smiling. “No ghost would ever dare to trouble Rampling Gate.”
Nothing, in fact, troubled the serenity of the days that followed—long walks through the overgrown gardens, trips in the little skiff to and fro across the lake, tea under the hot glass of the empty conservatory. Early evening found us reading and writing by the library fire.
All our inquiries in the village met with the same answers: The villagers cherished the house. There was not a single disquieting legend or tale.
How were we going to tell them of Fa
ther’s edict? How were we going to remind ourselves?
Richard was finding a wealth of classical material on the library shelves and I had the desk in the corner entirely to myself.
Never had I known such quiet. It seemed the atmosphere of Rampling Gate permeated my simplest written descriptions and wove its way richly into the plots and characters I created. The Monday after our arrival I finished my first real short story, and after copying out a fresh draft, I went off to the village on foot to post it boldly to the editors of Blackwood’s magazine.
It was a warm afternoon, and I took my time as I came back. What had disturbed our father so about this lovely corner of England? What had so darkened his last hours that he laid his curse upon this spot? My heart opened to this unearthly stillness, to an indisputable magnificence that caused me utterly to forget myself. There were times here when I felt I was a disembodied intellect drifting through a fathomless silence, up and down garden paths and stone corridors that had witnessed too much to take cognizance of one small and fragile young woman who in random moments actually talked aloud to the suits of armour around her, to the broken statues in the garden, the fountain cherubs who had had no water to pour from their conches for years and years.
But was there in this loveliness some malignant force that was eluding us still, some untold story? Unspeakable horror . . . Even in the flood of brilliant sunlight, those words gave me a chill.
As I came slowly up the slope I saw Richard walking lazily along the uneven shore of the lake. Now and then he glanced up at the distant battlements, his expression dreamy, almost blissfully contented.
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