Skullenia

by Tony Lewis

  Ronnie turned his head in the direction of the voice, wondering how this other person had managed to get into the room so silently.

  “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Major Buddy Cowan, United States Army. And now that we have the pleasantries over with, what I’m really interested in is who you are, and how you’re able to do what you do.”

  Cowan’s manner and tone of voice left Ronnie in no doubt that he was confronted with a man used to getting his own way, and who was unfazed by the methods he used to get it and unperturbed by the consequences of his actions, as long as the results were what he wanted to achieve. All of that considered though, Ronnie was still spectacularly annoyed at the arrogance of the man and, it being his way, he let Cowan know in no uncertain terms.

  “If you must know, I can’t do anything because you’ve got me trussed up like a Christmas turkey. And if you think for one minute that I’m going to tell you anything when I don’t know what the hell is going on here, then you are very much mistaken. And one more thing, if my hands were free I’d give you a salute that wasn’t strictly military.”

  A wry grin crowbarred its way onto Cowan’s rigid features, but it was as humourless as a funeral director who’d had some really bad news.

  “Oh, you’ll talk to me. I promise you’ll talk to me.”

  With that the soldier approached the table and took up a position that meant he was hovering right above Ronnie’s chest. He reached into a pocket of his dress tunic and pulled out a small silvery object.

  “It’s all very well, getting these medals,” he said admiring the piece, “but they can be quite flimsy and delicate. Ironic really, when you think of what a member of the forces goes through to be awarded one. Take this one for instance. The pin broke just after the President pinned it to my chest. You’d think they could afford something a bit more resilient, wouldn’t you? I mean, you get better pins on a child’s birthday card. Still, it’s pretty sharp.”

  With lightning speed he took hold of Ronnie’s wrist in a grip of steel and thrust the exposed pin under the nail of the little finger of Ronnie’s right hand. The scream he let out reverberated around the stark room, the waves of his shrieks bouncing off the bare walls and coming back to him in a mocking echo as the steel point penetrated the supple, raw tissue of the nail bed. Tears welled up in Ronnie’s eyes once more, as bolts of excruciating agony shot through his hand and up his arm. Cowan remained impassive as he stared down at his prostrate victim.

  “Smarts, don’t it? Messy too. Look at all that blood. And just think, there are nine more to go.”

  Cowan’s blurred figure shimmered and passed in and out of focus, as Ronnie tried desperately to cling onto the last vestiges of consciousness. The last thing he wanted to do was pass out. The thought of this raving lunatic let loose on his comatose body didn’t bare thinking about.

  “You see, son, I can be a reasonable man, some might say downright friendly, but that’s only if I get what I want. If I don’t, it tends to annoy me, and that’s when my nasty side takes over. I’m not proud of it and I feel terrible afterwards, but it gets the job done.”

  Ronnie exhaled long and hard as the pain from his pierced hand began to subside, and he concluded that Cowan had about as much ability to feel guilt and remorse as a bigamous, cold calling double glazing salesman who had just found all the day’s takings from a children’s charity shop and kept them. He needed to be placated and thus stalled, so Ronnie could try and figure out how to get out of this place.

  “Okay, can I have a minute to relax and gather my thoughts please?”

  Cowan placed a large and surprisingly soft hand onto Ronnie’s forehead and smoothed the moist hair back from his face. “You take five,” he said and left the room.

  Ronnie watched him leave, all the while clenching and unclenching his hand as the last of the pain eased off. He had to get out of here, that was certain, but for now the task was quite obviously impossible. His only hope at the moment, such as it was, was that Flug would realise he was taking too long on his sojourn into the woods and raise the alarm. Some choice that was, though. Hope that a uniformed psycho would take pity on him or rely on Flug who, at the moment, was probably still trying to count to ten.

  “Urrrrgggghhhh.”

  The noise came from Ronnie’s left. It seemed that his fellow guest had the constitution of something considerably larger than a buffalo. He was a big man, at least six feet four, and had a physique comparable to the bodybuilders you’d see at a Mr Universe contest. His arms were the size of Ronnie’s legs. You never know, he thought, with those muscles he might be able to break free of those straps. Let’s just hope he’s in a good mood.

  “Hey, fellah. You okay? Over here.”

  The big man turned his head and focused on the direction the sound was coming from.

  “Where are we?” he asked in a dry, cracked voice.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, mate,” said Ronnie. “If I was to have a crack at it, I’d say it was some sort of military installation.”

  “That would make sense, judging from the amount of soldiers we saw last night.”

  Ronnie looked at him with a puzzled gaze. “Were you out in the forest as well?”

  “Yup.”

  “I was following them for ages and I didn’t see you.”

  “Yes, you did. And I knew you were there because I recognise your scent. It’s a little blood tinged now, but it’s more or less the same.”

  “Recognise my…oh, I see. That was quite a fight you and your alter ego put up.”

  The other man snorted in derision. “If you say so, but if I was that good I wouldn’t be tied to this table, now would I? I said I recognised your scent but I don’t recall seeing you in the woods, and believe me, I don’t miss much. Where were you?”

  Ronnie wasn’t entirely sure about sharing all of the details about his secret gift with a total stranger, but seeing as he was almost certain that this person had a shape shifting secret of his own, he figured he was in good company, and it wouldn’t be too much of a social faux pas if he spilled the beans.

  “What’s your name by the way? I’m Ronnie.”

  The door burst open at that point, making them both jump as Cowan re-entered the room. “Nice to meet you, Ronnie,” he growled, an air of superiority and menace in his voice. “Now, if your new friend over there will tell me his name, we can conduct the rest of our business in a more relaxed and peaceful atmosphere.”

  “My name is James,” snarled the big man. “And if you think I’m going to cooperate with you, then you are very much mistaken.”

  Cowan walked over to James’ table. “Mistaken, am I? Well, we’ll see. Change for me.”

  “What?”

  “Come on, don’t be shy. I want to see you change. I know you can, because we saw you revert to human form after you were drugged. Don’t worry about me, we’ve got you strapped down tight enough to cover any eventuality, and Corporal Franks over there has another dose of tranq waiting for you.”

  Both Ronnie and James looked over to the door and saw a soldier with a weapon pointed directly at James.

  James had to admit to himself that he was more than a little worried. The metamorphosis into his wolf form would normally put the fear of God into anyone close enough to witness it. The sight of a grown man suddenly sprouting hair all over his body, dropping onto all fours and howling at the moon would be sufficient to put even the hardiest of souls off their stroke, unless you’d been to an Ozzy Osbourne concert, in which case you were probably used to it. But this guy was not only ready, he was actually asking to observe the phenomenon, so by giving him what he wanted the chances were that he would be opening himself up to a whole world of hurt. James decided that on this occasion, the best form of attack was ignorance.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, his voice steady and confident. “Change position, change my clothes, what?”

  Cowan sighed and folded his arms, looking at them both wi
th a stare comparable to what you would see on an angry parent trying to get a truculent child to confess to breaking a window.

  “Well, aren’t we both modest today? Fair enough. Seems like we’re going to have to do this the hard way. Guard.”

  Through the open door past Franks came two men dressed in white coats. They positioned themselves at either end of James’ trolley and proceeded to wheel it out.

  Cowan approached Ronnie once more and leaned over him in the same threatening manner as before. Ronnie’s pulse quickened and phantom pains shot through his arm, as if his central nervous system was recalling what had happened the last time this sadistic bastard had gotten this close.

  “You get some rest while we talk to your friend because believe me, you’re going to need it.”

  With that, he left once more. Ronnie heard a faint click and the room was plunged into darkness, leaving him all alone in the silence with nothing but his now overactive and colourful imagination for company.

  * * *

  Ollie and Stitches waved the black cab off as it thundered away into the distance, leaving behind a whirlwind of dust and litter that Hector Lozenge would be picking up later today.

  “Try as I might,” said Stitches, “I still can’t make out a word that bloke says. There’s cockney and there’s bloody annoying, and he’s managed to transcend even that. No wonder the Luftwaffe bombed the hell out of London. They probably just wanted them to shut up. Maybe that’s all the Second World War was about. Hitler didn’t like rhyming slang.”

  Ollie fished in his pocket for his keys. “That’s a little harsh, isn’t it?” He opened the door and stepped into the office.

  “Not really. If I live to be two hundred, I’ll never work out what he’s blathering on about.”

  Ollie raised an eyebrow as he dropped into his chair.

  “You are two hundred.”

  “My point exactly,” replied the zombie, taking his customary place in the chair opposite. “So,” he continued, “where do we go from here?”

  Ollie pondered for a moment. It was a very good question. There was no doubt that something peculiar was going on, but as to what the next step should be towards figuring it out was the tricky part. Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson they weren’t, and it was going to take a lot more than inspired deduction and detective brilliance to solve this one, and seeing as those two valuable qualities were in rather short supply round here, sheer luck and blundering blindly on regardless of any notable talent would probably have more to do with the final outcome. Ollie looked at the clock on his desk. It was getting on for three in the morning, and dawn usually broke early in these parts.

  “Sleep, I reckon. Then tomorrow, how’s about we ask round the town to see if anyone knows anything?”

  Stitches shifted position and rested his chin on a hand.

  “Yeah, sounds good to me. I could do with a rest anyway, after all that bleeding walking.”

  Stitches, of course, didn’t need sleep, but his aged body did require periods of inactivity on a regular basis just to keep things ticking over rather than falling off. It was more like looking after a classic car than a carcass. The only problem was you couldn’t get an MOT inspection for a corpse with a double centuries worth of usage. At times like these he would sit quietly in his room with the radio on, not to listen to but simply for some background noise. Then he would relax and drift off into a type of trance for a few hours while his desiccated innards and leathery skin were restored to some semblance of health and, more importantly, functionality. After the process he would feel much refreshed and toddle off to get on with something simple, so as not to over tax himself too much. Think about the average day in the life of a member of the House of Lords and you pretty much get the picture.

  Ollie was just about to rise from his chair when the office door swung open. This was followed by a loud, dense thud, indicating that Flug was on his way and had forgotten to duck again.

  Stitches turned and greeted his hulking friend.

  “Hi, Stitches,” Flug answered. “Where you been?”

  “Up to the castle, mate we had a real blast. I haven’t so much fun since Ronnie dropped one of his fags in my trousers.”

  “Dat good. Why you go dere?”

  “Do you remember Jocular?” asked Ollie.

  “Uh, yeah. Tall man, wear black, smell funny.”

  Ollie snickered. “Well, yeah, that’s him but don’t let him ever hear you describe him in that way. We had to go and see him because he wants us to try and find out why some of his wolf friends have gone missing.”

  Flug pondered this for a moment, grabbing the bolt in his forehead and giving it a jiggle, as if this action might aid whatever processes were occurring in the dormant organ residing in his skull fall into place and come out with something useful.

  “Maybe da ghosts took dem,” he said at long last.

  Stitches looked at Ollie and shook his head in an ‘I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about’ fashion.

  “What do you mean ghosts?” Ollie asked patiently, not wanting to rush the monster for fear of him becoming confused and imparting all sorts of nonsense to them. Or overloading, and crashing quicker than a ZX81 programmed to have two bouncy balls on the screen instead of one.

  Flug raised a finger and pointed at the door, presumably to indicate his general direction of travel this evening.

  “Me and Ronnie go for walk and Ronnie and me see sumfing in da woods, and so Ronnie go have a look.”

  “What did you guys see?” asked Stitches.

  “Movin fings in da trees. Dere was more dan one, and dey was shiny. Ronnie not know what dey were, but he say it might be fun to see where dey going and what dey doin’, so he follow dem.”

  “So he was following the ghosts?” asked Ollie.

  “Yeah, or maybe I fink dem witches.”

  “Why witches?”

  “Cos dem all carrying sticks.”

  Stitches pinched the bridge of his nose, being careful not to pull it off, and winced. “So,” he said, “Ronnie’s gone for a walkabout in the woods after some shiny, stick carrying, ghostly witches?”

  “Yup,” replied Flug proudly, pleased with himself that he was being so helpful.

  The zombie turned to face Ollie once more and saw that he was leaning back on the rear two legs of his chair, his head tilted upwards at the ceiling.

  “What do you think?” he asked tentatively.

  Ollie dropped his gaze and his chair, shook his head and sighed the sigh of the terminally dumbfounded.

  “I’ll tell you what I think. I think that Ronnie has gone off with some drunken mates of his on another glorious bender, and won’t be back for a few days. I also think that dear Flug here has finally let go of the tenuous grasp that he had on reality and is away with the fairies.”

  “So it’s not all bad then?” said Stitches.

  “If you say so. Flug, it sounds like you’ve had a busy night. Better be getting off to bed now, okay.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  “And mind your head on…”

  THUD.

  “Wassat, Boss?”

  “Never mind.”

  Stitches chuckled and shook his dusty head as he rose from the chair. “Well, as one egg said to the other as they were sitting in the mixing bowl, let’s get out of here before we get eaten. I’ll see you later.”

  “Yeah, goodnight.”

  Once he was on his own, Ollie started to wonder about Flug’s story. On its own it didn’t add up too much and hardly warranted close scrutiny, but taken with what had been happening in the area lately and Ronnie’s sudden urge to follow a strange group of people into the forest, there was a distinct, if remote possibility, that Flug just might have witnessed something out of the ordinary. No doubt they’d get a full report from Ronnie upon his return and that would put the matter to rest. Then, of course, it would be time for him to seriously consider getting Flug’s brain replaced with something a little more useful in the t
hinking department. A boiled potato should do the trick. You could buy them in ten pound bags and just one would triple the big dope’s IQ, so everyone was a winner.

  He tidied up his desk and left the office by the same rear door that led to the laboratory, but rather than turning down to the end of the corridor where Crumble worked, he turned right ten feet before that, which took him into another passageway. This, in turn, steered him to another staircase that descended deeper into the bowels of the building towards the basement. It was here that Ollie slept, in the very same coffin that his Father and Grandfather and umpteen other great Grandfathers had utilised before him. Let it not be said that vampires don’t have a sense of tradition. Or smell for that matter, if they could all ignore the stench coming from the box. Coffins had a tendency to soak up odours and, after a good few hundred years, they tended to get a bit funky.

  The coffin itself was massive and appeared to be constructed from extremely dark wood that Ollie thought might have been ebony, but he wasn’t sure. Stitches maintained that it was bloodstains from the countless virgins that had been slaughtered in this room over the aeons, but Ollie was much more comfortable with the dark wood theory. The coffin’s width had really surprised Ollie when he had seen it for the first time, but he had been reliably informed that it was that size because some of his more romantic ancestors, including obviously the original owner, had been partial to spending the night with the odd victim or two, a thought that gave Ollie baked bean sized goose bumps. Imagine waking to some exsanguinated, lifeless, dreary, slack eyed and toothless simpleton first thing in the evening. It would be like living in Norfolk. That was because being a vampire wasn’t all about devouring curvaceous, nubile young peasant girls twenty four hours a day, whilst trying to evade some Van Helsing clone or Peter Cushing wannabe who got his kicks running around in the middle of the night, dressed like a Victorian fop and waving a slightly threatening crucifix about. The life of the vampire could be hard and often was, especially if your territory was populated by people refused a bit part in Deliverance because they were too weird.