House of Darkness

by K. R. Alexander

  “Ripley?”

  “I’m fine—” I pulled away from Wade’s hand on my arm. “Where are we? This isn’t the basement. We fell too far.”

  “Hang on.” Also coughing and shifting around in the dark, Wade lifted his hands, creating a soft glow behind my head.

  “Everyone alive?” Gideon called from above. Now that was a sensible question. At least someone had managed to keep clear of the hole in the foyer.

  “Time will tell.” Wade was distracted as he coughed and spat dust and grit.

  Snorting and gasping, Adam scrambled up.

  I felt for the glasses. My eyesight wasn’t bad a foot away. I should be able to spot the things.

  Wade increased the faint glow from his fingers as he also looked for dropped flashlights. Magic took energy. We shouldn’t use it up on something that a flashlight could do instead.

  “Don’t keep moving,” I told Adam, watching his boot-like paws turning about. “I have to find my glasses.”

  He nosed, then licked my face, making me jump—though he was only cleaning up the trickle of blood. Was it weird that I’d just met this guy and he was licking my mouth?

  Wade cast a vivid orange orb the size of a soccer ball into the tunnel above us while Gideon shined in a flashlight beam.

  “Should I come down?” Gideon asked. “Going subterranean? They like that.”

  “Here…” Wade found the glasses. One cracked lens but I could fix that.

  “What?” I looked up into the vertical tunnel that we’d crashed through, finding a low ceiling, into which was set a hole about three feet wide.

  We had dropped from this and landed in what looked like a crude cellar of earth and stone. This chamber was below the house’s basement. We’d crashed into the sides and hit a moldy old rug that we’d brought with us, perhaps slowing the fall enough that we hadn’t broken bones. No apparent way to climb out but the ceiling couldn’t have been more than five feet up.

  “No.” I rubbed my head. “Why would you come down here?”

  Adam turned his face away, sniffing.

  Wade winced and rubbed the back of his own neck.

  “Where the pack goes the wolf follows,” Gideon called.

  “We don’t want you down here,” I said.

  “We want us up there,” Wade said, looking around uneasily, pale blue eyes shining sea green in the yellow light.

  “Can you do anything about that?” I coughed. Grit swirled like a blizzard. “There’s old farm equipment in the barn. Maybe ropes or chains?”

  I lost track for a moment while Gideon asked where we’d landed and Wade briefly described the place, still unable to see much in the dust. I had to focus on the glasses, guiding the energy and fixing the lens without destroying prescription properties.

  When I next looked up, Adam was moving away, sniffing through the room, fur bristling. Wade got tentatively to his feet. He stood with head and shoulders in the tunnel above so he could be upright. This cut off most of the light from the room as he sent the orb higher, drifting up the passage to reveal the shaft we’d tumbled down.

  I brushed off, coughed, spat dirt, and got painfully to my feet, having to hunch over, then eased into the space to share the opening with Wade. My palms and elbows were scraped, but the blood had stopped from my nose and everything else just seemed bruised.

  “We’ll want to go down anyway,” Gideon was saying. “Why not now?”

  “Down here?” I asked, easing in by Wade until I was almost standing on his feet. I looked up to Gideon and the light so as not to appear to be stepping into Wade for a kiss—which this otherwise felt like. “Why would we want to be down here?”

  It was a weird sensation, heads and shoulders basically in a chimney while the rest of us seemed disembodied. It made me feel dizzy, like being on a high ladder. I didn’t mind when Wade rested a steadying hand on my arm.

  “Vampires often live underground,” Gideon answered. “As long as you’ve already found the blood bank, how about I come down instead of you coming up?”

  “Then how would we get out? Besides, there aren’t vampires down here. It’s a small room and vampires need direct access. You know what they’re like.”

  “Then there must be another way in and out,” Gideon said. “Why a hole in the floor just here? To drop any human who might happen to visit the house right into the lair.”

  “Vampires aren’t strong or coordinated enough for work like that. I don’t know what did this but—”

  “Newborns?” Gideon asked.

  “Yeah … okay. A young vampire could have made it. But Midway City vampires are from the Civil War. They’re not wielding jackhammers or—”

  Adam growled.

  I crouched to my knees—fresh fear surging adrenaline that had already settled down after the scare of the fall. Wade followed, eyes wide. The orb popped out of existence above us. A fiery yellow light burst from his palms instead. Still dust haze all around.

  Adam had his tail to us, facing the far wall, his hackles raised, a growl rumbling from his throat. There, at the rough curve of the wall, loomed a black passageway.

  Just as this expanded reality dawned on me, I caught the smell. A sickly tang of death and decomposition in the airless space that Adam had noticed as soon as he’d cleared his nose and finished licking up blood. As we stared, a soft hiss sounded from down that black corridor.

  7

  I looked all around, making sure we hadn’t missed other hidden passages.

  Wade, with the light flickering in his hands, scrambled to stand inside the tunnel above us. “Wolf? I mean…”

  “Gideon,” I said.

  “Gideon?” Wade shouted. “A rope, a ladder, sheets tied together—throw something down!”

  “What’s wrong?” Gideon called.

  I grabbed Wade’s knee. “Quiet, it’s—”

  A shuffling sound was audible with the hissing. Adam crept toward the passage in the corner, growling all the time.

  “Throw down a bundle of stakes!”

  “Wade! Shut up!” I stood with him. “It’s only a vampire—”

  “Only?” he gasped, bending quickly for a look toward the black nothing, still empty of movement. “Then that is a vampire?”

  Adam’s tail swished as he stalked, rather like a cat facing a bird.

  “Yes, only,” I snapped. “Haven’t you seen a vampire? Don’t get bitten and you’ll be fine.”

  “Right, yeah, I knew that much—”

  “There’s a vampire down there?” Gideon sounded delighted.

  “Smells like it,” I said, glancing up to his flashlight a long, long way off. “Quite the coincidence the way things have shaken out. Though my mom would say no such thing.”

  “Your mom didn’t believe in vampires?” Wade turned his wide eyes on me, distracted from impending panic.

  “No such thing as coincidence. She would have said we were fated, brought together with vampire-hunters just in time to fall into a basement infested with them.”

  “Infested? You think there are more?”

  “Sure, it’s not often you just find one, is it?”

  “Nests like fleas,” Gideon called down. “Filthy, shit-faced, blood-sucking, stone-cold maggots.”

  Wade gulped and glanced up. “Maybe we shouldn’t be upsetting them?”

  “Gideon?” I said. “Can you get us out of here or not?”

  “What about the stakes?” Wade’s grip on my arm was cutting off the circulation. I longed to ram a chill pill down his throat.

  Adam still growled. The hiss moved closer.

  “Are you sure?” Gideon asked. “If that’s where the action—”

  “Don’t come down here!” Why couldn’t the spirits have sent people less crazy? “And you—” At Wade. “Pull yourself together. You said you had experience.”

  “You said hauntings, not vampiric infestations—”

  Back to Gideon. “There’s no real way out of here besides up. Don’t get trapped when yo
u’re the one who needs to get us out!”

  “Can’t you cast spells and get yourselves out?” Gideon asked.

  “Like … fly?” I asked. “What do you think we are? Tinkerbell?”

  “How about conjuring a rope?”

  Hiss and slide, something dragging along the floor.

  I stared up at him. “Out of thin air? You’ve been watching too many movies. Think I’ll wave my magic wand while I conjure it? At the same time you’re driven mad by the full moon and infect people with your werewolf bite?”

  “What are you talking about?” Gideon was apparently unfamiliar with mundane werewolf lore. “I’ll just come down. It’s not so far.”

  I wanted to scream and pound my head against the wall but shouted at Wade instead. “What?”

  “It’s there…” Wade’s voice squeaked. He’d been yanking at my arm.

  I crouched, bending my knees, and focused with him past the gray bulk of Adam blocking much of our view.

  In the pool of blackness that was the mouth of the low corridor, a hunched form emerged. Shuffling, dragging its feet, hissing and breathless, it flinched at the light, lifting one chalk-white hand, all knobby joints and twisted fingers, trying to protect its black, unreflective eyes. The face was a mess of black veins damp skin like lake slime. Only fragments of hair clung about the greasy dome of head. Bits of clothing, torn, stained, and moth-chewed, dangled from the shrunken shoulders no wider than a child’s.

  Wade recoiled into me, his light shuddering.

  Half-blind, even in the weak glow, the scrawny figure hissed and waved an angry hand at us, as if to banish light. In that moment of exposure and wheezy protestation, Adam lunged.

  The ragged little thing shrieked, long fangs flashing, but too late to bite into Adam as wolf jaws closed on its neck.

  “Gideon!” I called.

  “Here!” With the warning he tossed down a couple of stakes, bouncing and dropping along the two passages and through the basement above.

  I stepped aside to let them fall, meaning to grab one and plunge it into that thing’s chest while Adam held it. They might be immune to the venom, but a single bite could kill me or Wade.

  Only … I didn’t get that far.

  All in an instant, the appearance, Adam’s lunge, Gideon’s toss, Wade threw out both glowing hands with a shout that sounded more like shock and alarm than an actual word. The vampire’s head exploded.

  I screamed and jumped, toppling over in the rubble, ears ringing with the noise in the tiny room, as shocked as if Wade had yanked a machine gun out of his ear.

  Equally stunned, Adam sprang back with a yelp and snarl, sprayed with fragments of bone and dead, cold flesh. He wasn’t the only one. The mess splattered the space, bursting across the two of us with a few big chunks as well, though Adam’s bulk thankfully took most of the spray. Goo splashed my newly fixed glasses.

  “Holy shit!” I scrambled backward on debris. “What the hell was that? You just blew up someone’s head!”

  “What do you mean what was that?” Wade was also falling back, wiping his face with his arm, attempting to escape the horror when there was nowhere to go. “I was trying to save us!”

  “You blew up a head! You blew up a fucking head! Who—like—not—! What—?”

  Gideon was shouting down to us, though I couldn’t hear.

  Adam snarled and gagged, staggering around, swiping his face with a forepaw as the shrunken old vampire crumpled in a soggy mess.

  “That’s what we’re here to combat! What are you upset about?” Wade yelled back at me.

  “Upset? I’m not upset! That was the most powerful magic I’ve ever seen in my life! Who blows up a head? You’re like having a fucking Uzi along!”

  “Oh—I—I didn’t—it was a knee-jerk reaction. It was about to rush us—”

  “Rush us?”

  “Do you know nothing about vampires, mage?” Gideon called. “The old maggots couldn’t get up a head of steam rolling down a canyon wall.”

  “We were not in any danger,” I assured Wade, trying to pull myself together, still on my ass, leaned on scratched hands on the rubble-covered floor, bits of undead stuck to tight T-shirt and skin. “We had Adam between us, and he can take the bites. They’re feeble little things. It’s the evil spirits that are scary in these houses, not vampires—aside from their telepathy, and unless there’s one young enough to still resemble a human being, but they don’t often spawn. That thing was from the war, practically two hundred years old.”

  “That was as fast as it goes?” Wade gasped, hands trembling with his feebly glowing light.

  “Yes. But … wow… Angels and demons… That… Do you normally do that?”

  “I’d never tried before. There wasn’t much substance to that head. I don’t know if it would work on a human.”

  “The thing is, half that power, and Joe Blow would be equally dead. Maybe no more knee-jerk reactions?”

  “Yeah, right, I didn’t…” He gulped, wiped his face with the hem of his shirt, and nodded. “Sorry, Ripley. You okay? I didn’t mean … the mess…” He helped me up, offering his dusty shirt, which I willingly wiped my own face on.

  So stunned between the fall, bruises, and this, I felt weak-kneed enough to call it a night. Yet we’d just stepped in.

  No coincidences indeed. Two dire wolves and a human hand grenade—who seemed a nervous pretty boy on the surface—to clean houses? Yes, please.

  “There will be more down the passage.” I struggled for real breaths. “Let’s get out of here before they ‘dash out’ at us.”

  Wade managed a weak smile.

  I was about to brush myself off—muster some dignity. Up above, Gideon yelped and shouted in sudden pain. Wood snapped, the flashlight dropped into the overhead passage, then Gideon came tumbling toward us.

  8

  Gideon caught the edge of the foyer floor, swinging for a moment, ready to pull himself up, then yelled an oath. In the next instant he was falling into the passage above our heads, shouting something in a language I didn’t know.

  Wade and I dived out of the way as Gideon managed to land on his feet on the ledge of the basement floor above us, then tumbled back. Again, he caught himself, slamming into the earth and stone tunnel, before finally hitting and rolling in a fresh burst of dust.

  He was still yelling, switching to English. “That two-faced ass-wipe! Lowdown son of a vixen! I’ll wring his scrawny neck! I’ll turn the fucker inside out!” It went on as he coughed and struggled to his feet, scrambling back at the tunnel as if he would run up the passage like a spider. And on. Swearing like my grandfather reminiscing about Vietnam after his fourth pint.

  Adam abandoned keeping watch for us to bound over, sniffing Gideon, hackles up.

  Gideon yelled up the tunnel, shaking his fist at something. “Come near again and you’ll be wearing your ass between your ears, you swine-faced, shit-eating maggot!”

  Wade and I, sitting on the floor side-by-side after our dodge, glanced at one another.

  Wade cleared his throat and coughed dust. The only light came from the orange glow flickering around his fingers like embers.

  Adam snarled up into the tunnel, letting loose a sort of bark-growl, loud enough to make me jump, even amidst the yelling as it rattled around like a shot.

  Wade glanced at the dark passage and tried again. “Is it possible we could be drawing attention?”

  I chuckled, surprising myself. “Don’t worry about that. They’re not deaf. That ship sailed. All the way to the horizon.”

  He blinked at me, eyes widening, and the light in his hands very nearly went out.

  “Slow, remember?” I said. “We just need to get out of here.”

  My beanpole, pretty-boy, deadly-weapon sidekick gulped. “Any … plan on that?”

  “Hey?” I kicked Gideon in the ankle.

  He was already subsiding, bending and trying to see his own hands in the faint light, still muttering. Did shifters have their own langu
age? I’d never heard of such a thing. But I’d never heard a language like this either. Latin sounds to it, for sure. Beyond that, though…?

  “Gideon? What happened?”

  He shook his head, growling and not looking at me. Not like an argh human noise. Growling like a dog with a bone. His hands were bloody and scratched from the fall and catching himself on the boards. Plus…

  “He bit me,” Gideon finally answered, shaking his head in disgust and wiping bleeding hands on his filthy motorcycle pants.

  “Something bit you?”

  “A vampire?” Wade scrambled to his feet, breaths catching again. “Then we’re surrounded?”

  “Not a stiff. I could understand that.” Again, Gideon glared upward. “That fox.”

  I snorted. “A fox bit you?”

  “First he comes up behind me, bites one hand, then I catch the edge and he bites the other, the scheming little bastard.”

  “You’re shitting me.” I also got up, rolling my eyes in the dark. “A wild fox didn’t just sneak up on you.”

  “Pound his damn head in…” Reaching up to feel around inside the tunnel, seeking handholds.

  “It was probably a trick,” I said. “Infestations can make you see things that aren’t there, feel things you don’t feel. It’s part of the danger. It’s why you need a team to take on the really bad houses. Something wanted you down in here with us. I suppose a fox image worked as well as any since you’d just seen one. The vampires tapped into that.”

  Gideon withdrew to look around at us. “It’s a bit of a lost hunt, this chute. Where’s the place they’re shuffling from the blood bank? That might be our only way out.”

  “Like hell,” Wade said, flat.

  I pointed.

  Gideon squinted at the passage. “Crap… That’s…”

  “Not even four feet high?” I said. “We have to go up. Let me check it out. You two watch the passage. Wade? What about making handholds?”

  “Harnessing earth element?” Wade kept looking around, twitchier by the second. “Go ahead.”