Authors: Tim Curran
That’s it, Andy. Scare him to death. Scare that little fucking pimple to death.
Rule tried to lick his lips but they felt like burlap. This was not Andy; this was a dead thing from a grave. Andy had been wonderful and amazing, kind and sweet and bigger than life. But this…this
shell
was an animate doll, a living mannequin, a mocking puppet carved from coffin pine. There was nothing inside it but a vast, black, whirpooling nothingness.
Let me have him, Andy. Little fucker left us here to die. Let me show him what that was like.
The real Andy would have—and
had
—fought like ten tigers to protect his kid brother back in the dim days of the 1950’s. He would never have let anyone harm slight, bookish Denny Rule. Now, however, he sacrificed him easily, willingly, and with a cold, inhuman mirth.
Go ahead, Bugs. Show him your stuff.
Bugs was more than ready. What happened then was shocking and weirdly hallucinatory, but it seemed that somehow Bugs unzipped himself like a garment bag…and inside he was empty save for the furry, oily bodies of rats. What seemed dozens of plump rats pressed together to keep warm. They came out of him in a flood, pouring, creeping, surging, and Rule was drowning in them as their teeth bit into him and their claws laid his flesh open. The rodent waters rose higher and higher and he was going under, he was going to suffocate on filthy, flea-hopping rodent pelts.
Andy, Andy, no please Andy don’t let him—
He opened his mouth to scream and a rat wedged itself between his lips.
23
Wenda stopped.
This was the place.
This is where they wanted her to go and where she knew she
had
to go.
This was their lair.
There were coffins all around her…crude plank boxes and oblong packing crates jutting from the earth, lids sprung open in trenches in the ground, others scattered on the low hills of dirt around her. In the lantern light, she could see the bloody handprints and smeared red-brown fingerprints on the insides of the lids from being pushed open by the leeches when they arose for midnight feedings. But they all looked old, impossibly old, stains decades old. Rule was right: they had come out of dormancy this night. The very night that Morris arranged for the shoot. If that was karma, then it was karma of the fuck-you-and-yours variety.
Breathing hard, trying to keep the fear in her guts at a manageable level, she set the lantern down and pulled out one of her stakes. She waited with the knife and stake for what came next. She did everything in her power to appear bored, unconcerned, unimpressed…as if facing hordes of the undead was something she did monthly like menstruation, whether she needed it or not.
It was a ruse and she knew she was failing at it, but she did her best to put that out, doing it as Vultura and not Wenda. Now more than ever, she needed that mask to hide behind. The truth of the matter was that the fear she felt was huge and crushing. It ran cold fingers up her spine, slid slivers of ice into her heart, and filled her throat with sour-tasting bile. The fear was palpable and it owned her. And it was only magnified by the atmosphere of the catacombs, which was one of depravity and foulness.
Still, she waited.
She did not call out to the others; she figured they were dead so her mind refused to consider them. She could hear something like a distant wind, a faint dripping, little else but the throbbing of her own heart. She was aware of the fact that not only was the atmosphere becoming more virulent, but the stink was rising, a vile combination of dankness, age, and rot.
The rats were steadily gathering around her. They came in waves, bringing their sewer-smell with them. At first they hid in the shadows, their beady eyes appraising her with simple animal apprehension, but the more that arrived, the bolder they became. Now they were Roman citizens filling the Coliseum, squeaking and boisterous, shifting and
hissing, rows upon rows of them on the ground, ranks crowded atop the mill wreckage, clustering on timbers like magpies on telephone lines.
They had not come alone.
Up above where tree roots dangled like spidery fingers and sections of the mill hung from the earth precariously, bats roosted, stretching their wings and making chittering sounds, shitting down upon the rats beneath them.
They’re gathering for the show.
Wenda did not believe for one mad moment that they were intelligent enough to know what any of this was about. They were under the dominion of Griska and he brought them here in numbers to increase her unease. She did not doubt the sheer power, the inflexible authority of a mind that could do such things, but at the same time she saw weakness in it. Though the vermin offended her, she knew it was all drama, stagecraft, an attempt to undermine not only her drive and willpower, but to terrify her.
And she wasn’t about to say it wasn’t working.
In fact—
The temperature of the air dropped suddenly as something began to take shape around her. Except, it never really did take shape properly…it was a smoke ghost, a monster of the mist, something insubstantial like cold fog and hot wind that spun around her in a graveyard whirlwind. She saw white, white hands reaching out for her, a severe Slavic face that seemed to be dissolving to steam, two lurid red eyes…but all of it was constantly moving, constantly reshaping itself, constantly seeming pass through the four states of matter, gas to solid to liquid and, possibly, even plasma. It seemed to throw a field of energy around her that was burning hot then freezing cold. It was Griska, an ectoplasmic monstrosity
, and she was caught in his tempest.
She could not get away.
She couldn’t even fall to the ground.
He spun her around, dragging her inside of himself and spitting her out, lifting her and dropping her as her head spun with vertigo.
Let me
Let me
Let me in.
She wanted to scream and cry out, but she had no voice. He was peeling away the Vultura mask so she was simple, trembling, terrified Wenda Keegan, defenseless and hopeless. He was in her mind, circling around the edges, tormenting her, telling her how she was weak and he was strong, how if she did not submit her death was going to be ugly and of long duration. He would take her apart bit by bit, slit her open and let the rats feed on her internals while she screamed her sanity away.
The smoke gained substance and she saw something like a massive, membranous wing strike her, sending her plummeting into the dirt.
She tried to get her limbs working again as she crawled away from Griska’s vortex, but he pulled her up again and spun her around and around. She could feel something cold and wet licking her throat. It must have been his tongue. Then lips brushing her throat…repulsive, flabby lips like two blood-swollen leeches mating.
His mouth
battened to her own and sucked the air out of her lungs.
Now it felt like a dozen lips were on her, tasting and teasing
, gently sucking. As she wavered at the edge of reason, she knew if she did not fight and fight right now, all was lost. He would break what was left of her will and then drain her dry.
She could feel the knife in her hand.
Miraculously, she had not dropped it.
The stake was gone, but right now it was the knife that mattered and she knew it. It was an extension of what was inside her. With a silent cry breaking from her lips, she slashed and hacked at what held her. The blade slit it open, shredding it like cheesecloth, tearing it free from her like sticky cobwebs.
Griska instantly weakened.
She reached out and tore at his mass, gripping ribbons of snaking tissue in her hands that tried to go gaseous as she tore at them. She ripped. She tugged. And as she did so, she slashed. Her left hand, the hand that tore at him, was pierced by what felt like dozens of cold needles that made her fingers go numb. It went right up her arm, but the attack worked. He stopped spinning her. He ejected her from his mass and she heard a wailing, enraged scream that was his pain venting itself.
The stakes.
On her knees in the dirt, her head still reeling, she fumbled for them in her belt, but there was barely any sensation in her hand. She dropped one, then another. By then, Griska had her again. He lifted her into the air and tossed her. She struck a moldering, warped casket, but she did not drop the knife. She made to slash at him and he threw her twenty feet like a dog worrying a chew-toy. She hit the ground, the wind knocked out of her.
Don’t let him, don’t let him, don’t let him…win.
But he was winning and she knew it. Her defiance had surprised him, maybe even shocked him, but he had dealt with many like her during the long, gray procession of the centuries. He knew how to break her and he would. As
she made to slash him, it felt like a hundred hornet stingers punched into her, each piercing her and delivering its injection of venom. He tossed her and she rolled through the dirt. Her entire body felt numb now, frostbitten and senseless. The Griska-thing hovered over her, blowing around her, readying itself for what surely would be the death-blow.
Just lay here,
she thought.
Lay cool and easy. Play dead. Get it? Like when you were a kid, play…dead.
When she saw Griska’s cruel face pushing out of the noxious mist just inches from her own, she brought the knife around in a savage arc, slitting it from forehead to chin. It parted like cool jelly. She slashed and hacked at it.
“HERE!”
she screamed at his melting face.
“HOW ABOUT THAT? AND THAT? AND THAT? HOW DO YOU FUCKING LIKE THAT, YOU GODDAMN PARASITE!”
Griska shrieked, folding
in on himself and then mushrooming back out. Trying, it seemed, to control his shape, but having trouble as Wenda kept stabbing him, bisecting him with that damnable silver blade. He howled with agony and wrath. He had underestimated his opponent and now he was paying for it. And though he was still not strictly a corporeal being—part mist, part flesh, part boiling steam—he was wounded.
He was gored.
A foul smelling vapor hissed from his mass, a rain of watery brown-red blood going to the blackness of India ink. He still tried to attack Wenda with dozens of sucking mouths and jabbing needles, but it was half-hearted and almost pathetic, like a wounded dog trying to bite. Feeble, weakened.
Wenda got to her feet and slashed at the bleeding ghost, gutting it and tearing it open. Her onslaught was fierce, but so was his retaliation. Something like a fist was driven into her
temple and she was pitched to the ground. Shaking it off, she sat back up and something hot and acrid-smelling struck her full in the face, blinding her, sending her reeling with its foul odor. She brushed it from her face and it came again, a hot stream of…blood.
He was pissing on her.
He was pissing blood onto her.
When he stopped and she cleared the burning liquid from her eyes, he was standing not five feet from her. In his shaggy black hide coat, he looked like a human buzzard standing there and he smelled like one, too. The putrescence that filled her nostrils was not his odor—that was dry, dusty, and aged like a worm-holed book rotting on a shelf—but the stink of his breath, which was that of something that had been chewing on carrion.
But he was damaged.
She saw that much.
The other vampires had gathered now with the rats and they were all moaning with a high, eerie sibilance as if they could feel his pain and his…shame. He stood hunched over, enhancing his buzzard-like appearance, and Wenda knew she had damaged him with the knife. His face had indeed been slit open, the gash, perfectly bloodless, ran from the crown of his skull to his chin, perfectly splitting his hawkish nose. In fact, one side of his pallid, scarred face had slid down perhaps an inch, giving him the look of a reflection in a broken mirror and making him all that much more grotesque. His visage was narrow, bony, and rodent-like, spattered with blood, clumps of hair missing from his head, his flesh almost scaly, the teeth jutting from his mouth sharp and hooked like those of a pit viper. One eye was destroyed, gashed and popped like a blood-cherry, oozing a red-black juice down his craggy, graying complexion.
He brought up one hand and touched his face.
The fingers were remarkable white, remarkable long and oddly delicate, the nails ragged, yellow, and filthy.
With a thick accent, he said,
“You dare…you dare…you dare touch me?”
Wenda wanted to tell
him that,
yes,
she had dared and she would now dare to destroy him completely because time was on her side and dawn was approaching fast now. But he fixed her with his remaining leering red eye and held her like a bug on a pin.
As she trembled, he came for her.
24
Wenda heard the vampires begin to wail again with that unearthly, eerie sound of mourning. And it was not because Griska was coming to fix her, to empty her like an upended jug. No, it was because something else had shown up on the scene…a bunched, crawling thing that seemed to be primarily composed of rats, crawling, squeaking rats.