by Allan Kaster
“I hope they’re not conscious,” Mathis whispered.
Sagreda refused to entertain the possibility. “What are they meant to be?” she wondered. “A vampire someone tried to kill with a circular saw?”
Lucy stepped forward impatiently. “They’re a grisly sight, I’ll grant you that, but even if they’re stronger than they look, I’ll wager they’re not swift or agile.” Then without another word she bolted straight down the tunnel. At the last moment she veered to the right and passed by one of the half-men—almost certainly within arm’s reach, in principle, but while the creature swiveled and swayed toward her, it couldn’t really drop its crutch and grab her.
Sagreda was encouraged, but still wary. “So they’re not exactly zombie ninjas, but one nip might still infect us with the dividing plague.”
“Is that a thing?” Mathis asked.
“Not that my contributors ever heard—but there’s got to be one original idea in the whole ghastly book.”
Mathis made a larger target than Lucy, and the captain even more so, but the officially adult members of the party plucked up their courage and ran the gauntlet. Sagreda almost hit her head on the roof of the tunnel as she scampered up the side of the tubular floor, but the wheezing half-cadaver that turned arthritically to ogle her didn’t get close. She and Mathis caught up with Lucy, who had been wise enough not to go too far ahead in the dark.
“Good thing we have the Prince of the Night here to protect us,” Lucy chuckled. “What would us poor mortals have done on our own?”
“Don’t get too cocky,” Mathis warned her. “I often find myself wanting a snack around ten.”
Lucy tugged at the neck of her blouse to reveal a string of garlic circling her neck. Mathis said nothing, but he didn’t even flinch; Sagreda wondered if it was possible, even here, to believe that an object could ward off danger when in truth it had no effect at all.
The three of them sloshed ahead through the muck.
“What if there’s no cobalt blue in all of London?” Mathis asked, succumbing to a melancholy that had only seemed to afflict him since he started wearing ruffled shirts.
Sagreda found this scenario unlikely. “In hundreds of paintings, of hundreds of subjects? The SludgeNet will have scooped them up from actual Victorian artworks it found on the web, give or take a few woo-woo-isn’t-this-scary neural-net effects. Cobalt blue fits the period, and it wasn’t all that rare. It’s not like we’re hunting for neptunium in the Stone Age.”
She glanced at Lucy, wondering what the girl had made of the exchange, but it seemed to have passed right over her head. Most, if not all, of her contributors would have heard of neural nets and neptunium, but a vague sense of recognition for a couple of anachronistic terms wasn’t going to bring a consensual memory of the early twenty-first century flooding back. Given her character’s age, it was tempting to ask her if she knew who Justin Bieber was, and see if she denied him three times before the cock crowed, but it would be cruel to wake her to her true nature if they weren’t going to stick around and help her make sense of it.
“There it is,” Lucy announced. The drain from the house they were hoping to burgle was up ahead of them on the right. Mathis swung the lamp around as they approached; the narrow, slanting pipe was half open at the bottom, and Sagreda could see dark stains on the cement. There was a grille at the top, which would normally have blocked their access—but the maid had been bribed to take out the bolts that held it down and replace them with duplicates whose threads had been stripped.
Sagreda threw the woolen blanket she’d brought over the lower surface of the pipe, in the hope that they might enter the house without becoming so filthy that they’d instantly wake every inhabitant with their stink. Lucy clambered up first, leaving her galoshes behind. She raised the doctored grille carefully and placed it to the side, almost silently, then drew herself up onto the floor.
“You’re invited and all,” she called down to Mathis. Sagreda wasn’t sure if this would work; the maid, in turn, had invited Lucy, but that didn’t make either of them the homeowner. Nonetheless, Mathis ascended without apparent difficulty, taking the lamp with him.
Sagreda stood at the base of the pipe, gazing up into the lamplit basement. She’d ignored Lucy’s suggestion of a girdle, but it hadn’t been a gratuitous jibe; this was going to be a tight fit. She stretched her arms in front of her so she could rest on her elbows without adding to her girth, and began crawling awkwardly up the slope.
Halfway to the top, she stopped advancing. She redoubled her effort, but it made no difference; whatever feverish motion she made with her elbows and knees, they didn’t have enough purchase on the blanket to propel her upward.
Mathis appeared at the top of the pipe, crouching, peering down at her. “Hold onto the blanket with your hands,” he whispered. He pushed some of it down to loosen it, giving her a fold she could grip. Then he grabbed the top and started straightening his knees to haul her up.
When her hands rose above the top of the pipe she gestured to Mathis to stop, and she pulled herself up the rest of the way. “Well, that was delightful,” she gasped. She clambered to her feet and inspected herself and her crew; they weren’t exactly fit to present to royalty, but between the blanket and their discarded galoshes they appeared to have succeeded in leaving the most pungent evidence of their journey behind.
Mathis shoved the blanket back down into the sewer and he and Lucy fitted the grille into place, swapping back actual threaded bolts. The plan was to leave by the front door, rather than retracing their steps.
Sagreda turned away from the latrine and took in the rest of the basement. The staircase led up from the middle of the room, but on the opposite side there was a door with a small, barred window: an entrance to another room on the same level.
Mathis picked up the lamp and turned the flame down low as they walked toward the stairs. In the faint light, Sagreda saw something move behind the bars in the other room. There was a clink of metal on stone, and a soft, tortured exhalation.
She took the lamp from Mathis and approached the door. If there was a witness in there, the burglars had already revealed themselves, but she had to know exactly what risk they were facing. She lifted the lamp to the level of the window, and peered inside.
At least a dozen fragments of bodies were chained to the walls and floor of the cell. Some resembled the vertically bisected men they’d met in the sewer; some had been cut along other planes. And some had been stitched together crudely, into hallucinatory Boschian nightmares: composites with two torsos sharing a single pair of legs, or heads attached in place of limbs. Where there were eyes, they turned toward the light, and where there were ribs they began rising and falling, but the attempts these pitiful creatures made to cry out were like the sound of wet cardboard boxes collapsing as they were trod into the ground.
Sagreda retreated, gesturing to the others to continue up the stairs.
When they emerged on the ground floor, Lucy took the lamp and led the way down a long corridor. There were portraits in oil at regular intervals on the wall to their right, some authentically staid, some Gothically deranged, but none of them contained the desired blue.
They reached the drawing room. “Turn up the lamp,” Sagreda whispered. The piano, the cabinets and shelves, the sofas and small tables barely registered on her; they were just unwelcome complications, casting shadows that obscured the real treasures. The walls were covered with paintings: scenes from Greek myths, scenes from the Bible, scenes of clashing armies . . . and scenes of naval battles.
For a second or two she was giddy from a kind of ecstasy tinged with disbelief: after so long, it seemed impossible that she really had found what she needed; it had to be a cruel delusion, because the universe they inhabited was built from nothing else. But the feeling passed, and she strode over to the painting that had caught her eye. The ships were ablaze, but the sea was calm. No gray-green, storm-tossed water here, just a placid ocean of blue.
&
nbsp; Sagreda contemplated merely scraping off a few samples, but it seemed wiser to take the whole thing and be sure she had as wide a range of colors as possible, rather than a fragment or two that might turn out, under better light, to have been ill chosen. She unhooked the painting and wrapped it in a cloth.
Then she bowed to their guide. “If you please, Miss Lucy, show us the way out.”
Somewhere in the house, a door slammed heavily. Lucy extinguished the lamp. But the room only remained in perfect blackness for a few seconds before gaslights came on at the far end of the corridor.
Sagreda heard a rustle of clothing—maybe overcoats coming off—then a woman’s voice. “They were so rude to me! I can’t believe it! If I want to be called Lady Godwin, they should call me Lady Godwin!”
A man replied, “It’s a historical fact: she took her husband’s name.”
“Yes, but only because she had no choice! If she’d been vampire aristocracy, do you think she would have buckled to convention like that?”
“Umm, given her politics, do you think she would have chosen to be an aristocrat of any kind?”
“There are socialists in the British House of Lords, aren’t there?” the woman countered.
The man was silent for a moment, then he said, “Can you smell that?”
“Smell what?”
“You really can’t smell it? Maybe your thing’s clogged.”
“What are you talking about?”
The man sighed impatiently. “You know . . . the little canister thing in the front of the helmet, under the goggles. There’s a mesh around it, but I think sometimes the stuff clogs up the holes. Just give it a flick with your finger.”
The two customers went quiet. In the shadows of the drawing room, Lucy caught Sagreda’s eye and gestured to her to move behind a bookcase. Sagreda complied without hesitation, deferring to her accomplice’s experience.
“Okay . . . yeah, I can smell it now,” the woman announced. “That’s foul! Do you think one of our experiments broke out of the basement?”
“Maybe,” the man replied. “But it seems to be coming from down the hall.”
Sagreda heard their footsteps approaching. She tensed, wishing she could see exactly where Mathis was. A couple of ordinary householders would not have posed much of a problem—least of all customers, whom Mathis would have no qualms about dispatching—but she did not like the phrase vampire aristocracy.
“Wait!” the man said. The footsteps stopped, and then he groaned. “Yeah, yeah: sexy Russian babes are desperately seeking broad-minded couples to help fulfill their fantasies. How many times are they going to show me this crap before they realize we’re never going to follow the link?”
“You could go ad-free, if you weren’t so stingy,” the woman chided him.
“Stingy? Five dollars a month is a rip-off!”
“Then stop complaining. It’s your choice.”
“What costs do they actually have?” the man protested. “The books they start from are all public domain, or pirated. The world-building software comes from open-source projects. The brain maps they use for the comps are data from open-access journals. So, I’m meant to fork out five dollars a month just to pay rent on their servers?”
“Well . . . enjoy smickering at your Russian babes, Lord Scrooge, I’m going to find out what’s stinking up the house.”
The woman must have decided to approach on tiptoes, because Sagreda heard nothing but floorboards creaking. From her hiding place she could see neither Mathis nor Lucy, and she felt like a coward for not rushing out to block the doorway with the captain’s ample girth. But the fact remained that the mild-mannered aficionado of kitsch creeping down the corridor, who would not have said boo to any fleshly equivalent of Sagreda if they’d sat next to each other on a bus, had been endowed by the game with the power to rip all of their throats out—and endowed by her own lack of empathy with the power to take off her goggles and sleep soundly afterward.
The woman spoke, from just inside the doorway, calling back to her companion in a kind of stage whisper, “It’s definitely coming from in here!” Maybe her “experiments” were so brain-damaged that they would not have been alerted to her presence by these words. Or maybe she just didn’t give a damn. At five bucks a month, how invested would she be? If things turned out badly, she could still order a pizza.
There was a sound of bodies colliding, and the woman crying out in shock, if not actual pain. Sagreda stepped out into the room to be greeted by the sight of Mathis holding Lady Godwin with her arms pinned from behind, his fangs plunging repeatedly deep into her carotid artery as he filled his mouth with blood then spat it out onto the floor. His victim was strong, and she was struggling hard, but he’d had the advantage of surprise, and whatever their relative age and vampiric prestige, his assault was progressively weakening her.
Sagreda ran to the fireplace and picked up a long metal poker. As she approached, both vampires glared at her furiously, like a pair of brawling cats who’d rather scratch each other’s flesh off than brook any human intervention. But she wasn’t here to try to make peace between house pets.
She rammed the poker as hard as she could between Godwin’s ribs; the author-turned-unlikely-vivisector screeched and coughed black blood that dribbled down the front of her satin evening gown, then she went limp. Sagreda was sickened; even if her victim would barely feel a tickle in her VR harness, the imagery they were sharing debased them both.
Mathis dropped his dead prey and snatched at Sagreda, as if he was so enraged to have been cheated of the animal pleasure of the fight that he was ready to turn on her as punishment. She stood her ground. “Don’t you fucking touch me!” she bellowed.
“What’s going on?” asked Lord Shelley irritably. Mathis turned to confront him, but this time it was no ambush; the older man grabbed him by the shirtfront and thrust him aside with no concern for conservation of momentum, sending him crashing into a corner of the room without experiencing the least bit of recoil.
As Shelley gazed down in horror at his murdered wife, Sagreda backed away slowly. Reminding this bozo that it was only a game would only get her deleted.
The undead poet raised his eyes to the captain and spread his fanged jaws wide in a howl of grief.
“‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair?’” Sagreda offered sycophantically.
Lucy chose this moment to make a run for the door. Shelley turned and grabbed her thin arm, then bent down and sank his fangs into it, apparently deterred by her garlic necklace from striking in the usual spot. Sagreda leaped forward and punched him in the side of the mouth with all of the captain’s mortal strength; to her amazement, her blow dislodged his jaws from the girl’s flesh. Lucy was bawling with pain and terror; Sagreda kept striking the same spot above Shelley’s chin with her massive right paw, as fast and hard as she could, unsure if it was just her knuckles and finger bones that she could hear cracking and crumbling from the impacts.
Mathis whispered calmly in her ear, “Step aside, my love.”
She complied. Shelley looked up, but he had no time to react. Mathis drove the poker into his chest, all the way through to his spine.
As Shelley slumped to the ground, Lucy fell beside him, looking every bit as lifeless. Mathis took his coat off, tore one sleeve free and wrapped it around the girl’s upper arm as a tourniquet.
“What are you doing?” Sagreda asked. “That’s so tight, you’re . . .” She stifled a sob of revulsion. “Don’t cut it off!”
“I’m not going to,” Mathis promised, “but we need to move fast to get the poison out. And I can’t do it, that would only make it worse.”
Sagreda stared at him. “What?”
“I’ll apply pressure; you have to suck the wound and spit.”
“You’re sure that will work?”
“Just do it, or she’s either going to lose her arm or be turned!”
Sagreda quickly relit the lamp so she could see what she was doing, then she knelt on th
e floor and set to work. When every drop had been drained or spat onto the carpet, leaving Lucy’s arm corpse-white, Mathis loosened the tourniquet and the flesh became pink, bleeding freely from the puncture wounds above the wrist.
“Let it bleed for a bit, just to flush it out some more,” Mathis insisted.
“How do you know all this?”
“I’m guessing,” he admitted. “I’ve heard things from the other vampires, but I don’t know if I ever got the whole story straight.”
Sagreda sat on the bloody floor and cradled Lucy’s head in her arms. There was no actual poison being traced through some elaborate, fluid-dynamical model of the circulatory system; the game would make a crude assessment of the efficacy of their actions under its fatuous rules and then throw its algorithmic dice.
They had love, and they had reason, but the game could still do whatever it liked.
8
Shortly after sunset, Mathis emerged from the captain’s bedroom, bleary-eyed and yawning. “Did you get any sleep?” he asked Sagreda.
“A couple of hours, around noon,” she replied. “But it’s done.” She gestured toward the mosaic. “I just need you to check it.”
“Okay.” Mathis slapped his own face a few times, trying to wake more fully. “How’s your hand?”
“Still broken. But I don’t plan on having to use it much longer.”
Mathis managed a hopeful nod. “And Lucy?”
Sagreda said, “She seems stable; her pulse is steady, and she has no fever.”
Mathis took a seat in the nearest armchair and turned to address Sagreda. “The game’s not going to accept that its biggest celebrity couple has been removed from the plot. But the SludgeNet’s not going to reboot everything while the city’s crawling with customers who want to maintain continuity. So, the way I see it there are only two options. They can pull a bit of necromantic fluff out from under the sofa cushions and bring the Shelleys back in an explicit act of resurrection that would make Sigourney Weaver blush. Or, they can pretend that what happened last night never really happened and just delete the witnesses.”