by Various
Aid came from an unexpected quarter. Clutching an ax she must have found discarded upon the deck, Carmelita Aponte raced forward and began chopping at the tentacle with unexpected fury. “Liberala! Permita ir!”
The kraken’s hide was too tough and impenetrable, however, so the valiant senorita labored to no avail. Her feverish blows barely scratched the surface of the unyielding tentacle.
“No,” Robin groaned. Devil take me, she realized, there be only one course left to us. Her strength fading, she stared urgently into Carmelita’s eyes, then shifted her gaze down to where her upper arm emerged from the tentacle’s coils. “Comprende?” she pleaded, praying that the Spanish girl would realize what was necessary.
Understanding dawned upon Carmelita’s face. “No . . . no!” she protested, shaking her head.
“You must!” Robin entreated. Her feet slid perilously upon the deck as she fought to stay aboard. Darkness encroached on her vision, dimming the moonlight, as her blood fed the submerged sea monster. A sickly lassitude beckoned, and she struggled to keep her eyes open. “Now!”
Carmelita nodded. Biting down hard on her lower lip, she raised the hatchet high, then chopped off Robin’s arm just below her elbow.
Robin screamed as the tentacle disappeared into the sea, taking the Slayer’s right hand with it.
* * *
“There,” Dr. Pratt said approvingly. “A perfect fit.”
Resting in the cabin of Neptune’s Lady, Robin inspected the physician’s handiwork: a custom-made timber stump with an empty cavity sufficient to bear a wooden stake, a silver spike, or any other implement that might be deemed necessary. She swung her arm experimentally, imagining it in battle.
’Twill do, she decided, wincing slightly as she recalled the rough amputation that had preserved her life at the expense of her hand. Although Dr. Pratt had swiftly cauterized the wound by sealing it with boiling pitch, the brutal shock, along with the attendant bloodloss, had taxed even her prodigious powers of recuperation. “Thank ye, doctor,” she said sincerely. “I figure it be a miracle we came through that fray alive, if a trifle less than intact.”
“Indeed,” her watcher agreed. “It is not every day or night that one encounters such a formidable denizen of the deep. From my reading, I believe it to have been no less than a chthonic remnant left over from the primordial days when the elder demons ruled the Earth . . . and the seas.”
Robin tried to picture a bygone age when the likes of the blood-sucking kraken dwelt in abundance throughout the oceans of the world. An icy shiver crept down her back. Thank heaven that wretched idol be gone at last, she mused; despite her injury, she had personally seen to it that the golden effigy was tossed over the sides of the galleon, and had watched with profuse relief as the idol sank under the waves, where, if Providence was kind, it would remain lost for all time.
So much for matters infernal, she concluded, rising from her chair and marching out of the cabin. Now there was but one more bit of business to dealt with.
The deck of the schooner was alive with the sun-baked bodies of busy buccaneers tending to the sails as Neptune’s Lady journeyed back to Jamaica. Off the starboard rail, the El Dorado, somewhat the worse for wear but still seaworthy, lumbered alongside the schooner, manned by a newly contrite crew of former mutineers. A warm tropical breeze helped speed both vessels on their way.
Robin climbed onto the quarterdeck and, placing two fingers to her lips, whistled to get the men’s attention. “Ahoy!” she hollered, raising her truncated right arm. “Give me yer ears, every man jack of you!”
All eyes turned toward the captain, curious and dutiful. Among the upturned faces, Robin was amused to see Carmelita Aponte’s exotic features. Having traded in her bedraggled saffron gown for much more practical sailor’s garb, the orphaned senorita, whose bruised wits and spirit had mended considerably since saving Robin from the kraken, appeared to be blending into the pirate crew with remarkable ease.
Encouraged by Carmelita’s example, Robin doffed her heavy woolen coat. With but one set of fingers at her disposal, it was awkward work, but soon the bulky garment dropped limply onto the spray-stained planks. Robin then fumbled with the bottom of her striped linen shirt, knotting it tightly beneath her bosom, so that her unmistakably feminine contours were made manifest. The strangling cravat was the next to go, carried away by the wind as Robin tossed it heedlessly aside.
“Well?” she demanded, daring all and sundry to make an issue of her sex. “Here I be, in all me unmasked glory.” She posed with arms akimbo, looking out over the length of the schooner. “Does anybody care to question me command?”
A rousing cheer dispelled her doubts once and for all. “Hurrah for Cap’n Rob!” Jeremiah Pyle called out boisterously, and the rest of the beaming pirates took up the cheer. Even Carmelita, despite her scanty command of English, joined in. “Cap’n Rob forever!”
The Slayer basked in the acclamation of her crew, ready at that moment to take on a score of leeches and Spaniards alike. It feels good to be a woman again, she reflected. A steady breeze blew past her, ruffling her trim auburn locks while filling her nostrils with the intoxicating aroma of the open sea.
Perhaps I’ll even grow me hair long.
The Ghosts of Slayers Past
Scott Allie
LONDON, ENGLAND, 1843
The Vampire Slayer was dead; of this Charlton Muzzlewit was sure. I do not mean to say that his particular slayer had met her end, that this West End watcher had found himself suddenly without charge. For what would that matter, anyway? Of what importance is the life, or in this case death, of one child? No, the tradition of the Vampire Slayer is a grand history of ghastly deaths visited upon heroic girls; but it was that very history that the watcher this night mourned. For surely his young slayer, now fiercely engaged with a common gutter vampire, marked the ultimate decline of the fine tradition.
Charlton Muzzlewit stepped back an inch from the precarious stack of empty crates, from which paper labels peeled back at the corners in the damp night air. The labels bore the name of a popular spirit from an out-of-town distillery; Muzzlewit and his young charge faced their prey—she moreso than he—this thick and pressing evening behind a public house in the neighborhood off Blackffiar’s Road near Lambeth Palace. He held his hands lightly against the crates, not so much to brace himself as to brace the haphazard pile from crashing down upon him. In his simple and worn—though nonetheless fine—brown suit, he blended perfectly into the murky scene in the alleyway. Beneath the suit, he wore a gold-colored vest, the only accent in his typically drab presentation. Beneath the vest the shirt was brown; even the collar was brown. A great swirl of brown hair spiraled from the part (combed as straight and flat as the gentleman could manage without the benefit of wife nor maid), curling sharply under the ears. A great nose distinguished an otherwise forgettable face, and a great bump adorned the nose itself, too high to support spectacles, which instead tended to slide toward the tip. Unbeknownst to Charlton Muzzlewit, his few adult associates found him a somewhat comical character.
Young Catherine Hogarth drove a short, pointed holly branch into the head of her opponent. Not merely the head; the dull end of the stake now bobbed horribly from the fiend’s eyesocket, which disgorged a red froth upon the cheek. It was almost too much for poor Muzzlewit. As the creature bellowed, echoing down the canyon of riverside buildings, Catherine offered cold comfort.
“No eye at all’s better than an evil eye, dark master,” the girl barked in her heavy East End accent, so that for a moment Muzzlewit thought she said “dock master.”
“That,” he muttered, “is too much.”
As if hearing her lord, Catherine Hogarth produced another stake of holly and pounded it through the screaming beast’s heart, returning him to the dust from which we all come.
“Well, sir, I kilt another for you. That’s, what, four this week, no? Must put me in some kind of vampire hunter record book!”
“You’re a vamp
ire slayer. And while we keep many books, I’m afraid there’s no tallying of scores.”
“Oh, right. You’re just here for lookin’, yeah?” Catherine said without guile as she picked up her drab bonnet from where it had fallen at the start of her skirmish. The chin strap had torn away, so she gathered her tangled hair and pulled the bonnet tightly over it, then looked round as if to claim any lost articles. Finally remembering that both stakes had turned to dust with her victim, she set her hands on her broad hips and let out a deep “harrumph.”
“Furthermore, Miss Hogarth, you undertake these nightly missions not for me. It is your destiny, and it is this calling alone which elevates you above your peers in this wretched neighborhood.”
“But that’s just why I say I’m doin’ it for you, m’lord. Most East End girls don’t have no destiny. You’ve done me a right favor bringing this whole thing to my attention like.”
As they went their separate ways that night, Charlton Muzzlewit happened to turn, and he fancied he saw a cloud of doom hovering not inches above the ignorant young thing’s head.
* * *
It had often been pointed out over the years, by those outsiders familiar with the Watchers Council, that though the Slayer might save the very world itself and stave off the hosts of hell, she could never enjoy remuneration for her efforts. So it was, and so it should always be, that at the end of each night, the valiant slayer retires to her slum or crude hut, either on the wrong side of town or outside the town entirely. Perhaps it was with this sense of tradition that Catherine Hogarth proceeded to sidestep clots of human waste that floated down the streets running out of London’s lower East End and into the pungent Thames.
Watchers, however, tended to be educated men from good families who accepted their calling after some success in life—all of which explained the roomy, two-story house to which Charlton Muzzlewit retired that late evening on Marlybone Road in the pleasant neighborhood of Regent’s Park. Though we flatter Miss Hogarth to suppose she pondered the history of the slayers and watchers on her way through Whitechapel, Mr. Muzzlewit thought of little else.
His father, Hayward H. Muzzlewit, had been actively engaged as a watcher for only ten short months back in 1842, in the foggiest recesses of Charlton’s memory. Of his father’s slayer he remembered nothing, but in the thirty years since, he’d had the opportunity to meet many of the other girls to serve—each with less skill and grace than the last. His discouragement reached its peak when the last girl, a young tart from a medieval village in the south of France, followed her watcher to the great city of London. She liked nothing more than to play games and to grin suggestively, as though she held some secret regarding everyone she met. Her backwoods demeanor compounded the accident of her birth into that most loathsome class of creatures: the uneducated French.
With a shudder, Charlton Muzzlewit closed the curtains of his bed on such harsh memories and laid himself to sleep.
* * *
Sometime in the unknown and uncounted hours of middle night, Muzzlewit woke to see the curtains of his four-post bed drawn back by the hand of his father, whom he’d laid to rest some fifteen years ago. While this might not, for whatever reason, surprise the reader, one can rest well assured that it surprised Charlton Muzzlewit. He shot out of his bed, backward and at great speed, tripping on the hem of his nightgown and tearing the entire bed curtain off the bedposts and out from his father’s withered and unlikely hand. The light scrim flipped up from over the top of the structure, settling upon the trembling and gaping watcher.
The apparition leaned forward and pressed a hand on the mattress, as if to test for firmness. The dead man looked nothing like his son. He was admirably bald with a peaked crown to his head, making his forehead appear flat. A similarly pear-shaped torso featured narrow shoulders and a gut that bore down menacingly over the belt. He shifted his hips stiffly and lifted one leg up onto the bed, like an injured rider sitting sidesaddle, and rested his hands on one knee.
“Damn it, boy, you’ve not learned a bit of coordination in all these years I’ve been gone.”
“F-father,” observed Charlton Muzzlewit, before collapsing in a spasm of chills.
“Come, now, Charlton. You spend your every night chasing down the undead. Surely the sight of your own father cannot take the starch out of your shorts.”
The younger, livelier Muzzlewit gritted his teeth, set his brow, and mustered up what dignity he could, as he fought desperately to unwind himself from the lightweight bed curtain. His own muffled grunts and groans spared him his father’s rattling chuckle. When finally he stood free of the linen prison, the ghost walked round the bed and stood with his thumbs hooked into his front pants pockets, a stance all too familiar to the heir whom he now sized up.
The dead man frowned, the lower lip jutting out past the chin, which Charlton knew did not necessarily indicate displeasure. The gentle nodding of the fruit-shaped head, in fact, suggested the most overwhelming approved for which the son could have hoped.
“You’ve grown up straight and tall, my son, and I’ll even admit that you’ve turned out a bit stronger than I’d dared hope. You never filled out, not to speak of, and I see by the state of the place that you didn’t manage to secure a wife. But neither did you gamble off the family home, so I must thank the good Lord for these small favors. I have to say that in this respect I’m somewhat surprised, and not nearly so disappointed as I’d prepared myself to be.” Charlton Muzzlewit took the compliment in the spirit it was intended; he flinched slightly, as from a sharp blow to the cheek.
“But you haven’t a heart, boy. Oh, you watch young Catherine in her nightly service, but you’ve no compassion for the girl. You press her to lay down her very life for the council, yet you know nothing of that life she’d so gladly give. As I hear it, you even strike her if she botches a kill.”
Charlton frowned; he’d always loathed the old man’s colloquialisms. “Father, you taught me to be stern with my charge. And I remember you striking your girl, Samantha.”
“Well, if I’d wanted to discuss any indiscretions of my own, I needn’t have returned from the afterlife to do so here with you, need I? Might be I’ve spent the last fifteen years worrying about all that, and my son should be glad to hear whatever it is I’ve learned. You think?
“Now, if you’re done your babbling,” the ghost said, gathering up the bed curtains from the floor, “I’ve only got a few words for you, and then I leave this house to your further abuse. Though you listened with nearly as much fear when I lived as you do tonight, not a word of mine ever sunk in to that mop-head of yours. So the powers that be figured you’d need to hear it from someone else.” Hayward H. Muzzlewit pinched the corners of the curtain with the thumb and forefinger of each hand, and lifted it as a sheet before him, his visage even more ghostly now through the transparent fabric. “You’ll be visited this night by three spirits, and it should be God’s mercy if you learn a damn thing from any of them.”
With this the elder Muzzlewit released the corners of the scrim, which settled slowly to the ground, revealing an empty spot where he had, it seemed, just stood. The younger Muzzlewit was alone again. But only for a time.
* * *
Being of a naturally nervous temper, thanks in no small part to the manner of his father, Charlton Muzzlewit spent the next little while in a dead panic. He hated the dark, which made him not the most effective watcher, always shambling home shortly after midnight, as he had this very eve. Yet now he paced from window to door and back, well past twelve, but well before the dawn, when no decent company was to be had and no proper activity could adequately pass the time. Bunching and stretching the front of his nightgown in nervous fingers, the cursing of his father’s name so preoccupied him (though he did this under his breath, lest someone take him for a madman) that he did not spy the lithe form of a girl passing behind him; she even had time to reset the slightly torn bed curtains before he noticed her. He turned, screaming to high heavens in a voice good
for shattering glass.
Not waiting for the shriek to die on his lips, the girl fought to be heard over his falsetto solo. “A good evening, Mr. Muzzletwitch. I am Carissa the Vampire Slayer.”
Muzzlewit clapped a hand over his mouth, cutting off the uncontrollable tone. The trapped cry became a momentary pressure at the back of his eyes, after which the sound abated altogether, except for a certain ringing in his ears. He worried momentarily about the servants, then remembered that the servants had been let go fourteen years past. Ah yes; it all came back to him.
“Carissa. Carissa Avenhaus, the Dutch slayer of . . . 1670?”
“That is 1673, sir.”
“I meant your starting date, not your, ah, finishing date,” he said, attempting to flatten the front of his wrinkled nightgown.
“They are not so far apart for the most of us, as you know well,” the girl said, lowering her chin and brushing back the golden curls that fell before her eyes.
“Fascinating,” he said, courageously approaching the deceased fifteen-year-old virgin, examining her simple, yellow dress and white laced apron, her cloth shoes tied at the ankle. “Another girl of low station selected for a short but dignified service to mankind . . .”
“Yes,” she snapped, his head snapping backward in response. “Well, it was a real honor, and you are most certainly welcome.” She looked down her short, pert nose at the hunched man inspecting her, and crossed her arms over her bosom. “But we have no time for you to be staring at me like some mad doctor. There are other things which are to be seen this night,” said Carissa the Vampire Slayer, waving a thin, fair hand before his face. Speckled moonlight from her fingertips lulled Charlton Muzzlewit toward a sudden state of peace, into which he gratefully swooned, his eyes drawing slowly shut.