The Watchtower (36 page)

Will affixed Dee with the most intimidating stare he could muster. "Who is this amazing being you will summon, who will bring me immortality?"

Dee ignored Will's forbidding expression, smiled benignly back. "We are dealing with forces of great potency here, my lad. You can hardly expect beings associated with such forces to be sweet and cuddly. That is the only perspective I can offer. Suffice it to say that if you cannot deal with the fearsome, you should not be here. Otherwise, the sooner you hand over box and ring, the sooner we can proceed." Dee's soft look transformed to one of impatience.

Again Will saw Dee's logic, but his heart told him to hesitate. He had not thought through this meeting enough in advance. He hadn't realized this sort of vulnerability could occur.

"Sir Dee, can you provide me with proof--or at least evidence--that this process is going to be successful before I hand over these objects to you, however temporarily? They're not my property. I need to return them to my beloved."

"Ah, the beatific Marguerite," Dee said, as if he'd forgotten about her. "I'm sure she will be overjoyed to have her possessions returned. Your solicitousness about them, and her, is to be admired. But, no, if you want to make a point of it, you can't have 'evidence' or 'proof.' The transaction belongs to a realm in which such concepts don't exist. On one side of your decision is the great John Dee with his impeccable intellect and moral grandeur, and the ecstasy that will be yours spending eternity with Marguerite. On the other side is a sniveling coward's surrender to weakness. I cannot make the choice for you, Hughes. I can say which choice I think you're going to make, given your sound judgment, your physical beauty that suggests a moral one as well, in fact your magnetic presence sitting here before me now."

A glitter came into Dee's gaze that made Will uncomfortable. "I could be wrong about your choice. Ibeloat case please withdraw from me before I cast your pestilence into the sea. But I hope I am right. It is up to you. I await your judgment." The glitter in Dee's eyes subsided into something else more subdued, more remote. A less acute longing? Will couldn't tell.

Still uncertain, he relaxed his possessiveness about the satchel enough to lay it on a cushion to his side. Dee remained several paces away at the opposite wall. Will then took the ring out of his pocket and held it up before him in the dim candlelight, looking at it as if the duration of his gaze could ensure its power. At one angle the stone appeared blank, but then tilted to another angle the design appeared. A tower. Perhaps this tower. Perhaps Marguerite's ring had been leading him to this very tower ... to this fate. Surely that was a sign.

He looked up from the ring and was startled to find Dee's face only inches from his own, his amber eyes riveted on the ring. Dee's hand was stretched out, his long, yellowish fingernails nearly touching it. Will shrank back from the avarice in Dee's eyes and the man's clawlike hand, clutching after the ring in Will's fist. But then why had he come if not to relinquish the ring and the box into the wizard's hands? He was unwilling to return to Marguerite still a mortal. He would have to trust Dee.

He handed the box over to him first, then the ring. Dee touched a pattern of concentric circles on the box with one of his long fingernails. In the flickering candlelight the lines seemed to move ... they
were
moving. They began to revolve in circles like a model of Ptolemy's universe that Will's science tutor used to bore him with. Faster and faster, like a whirlpool, so fast that looking at them began to make Will dizzy. He wrenched his eyes away and saw that the whirlpool effect was not limited to the lid of the box. The air above the box was moving in the same circular motion, the disturbance expanding outward in a reverse conical shape that picked up the papers on Dee's desk and tossed them into the wind like autumn leaves before a storm ...

A storm that had spread to the sea. The water outside was now thrashing, as if in response to the maelstrom raging here in the tower room. Dee carefully placed the box on the windowsill, lifted the lid, and lowered the ring into the box. He chanted a string of Latin words out of which Will, never the best Latin scholar, caught only
vita
and
perpetua.
Perpetual life. Yes, that's what he had come for, he reassured himself, even as he began to feel an oppressive, stifling sense of being crushed in the room, a sort of airless panic. Perhaps the storm was sucking air out into its vortex. This claustrophobic breathlessness tempted Will to flee room and tower immediately, without box and ring. But a moment's glance outside dissuaded him.

A flash of silver light leaped from the box, streaked across the water, and struck the tower on the island off the coast. In response, a silver beam emanated from the tower, lighting a path back across the ocean. In the unearthly light, Will could see that the ocean was boiling like an evil witch's potion. A long, low moan issued from the depths of the ocean.

"He has awoken," Dee said, a ghastly smile on his face. Then, pointing his crooked and yellowed nail out the window: "He is coming!"

"
What
is coming?
was
coming. Something was swimming through the water at an impossible rate, heading straight toward the tower.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Dee chuckling at him. Dee pushed himself back from his desk, leaned against the wall in his chair, and laughed even more enthusiastically when he saw how tormented Will was. His jovial relaxation said to Will,
You're
mine,
now.
All
mine.
Will suddenly knew that he had made a terrible mistake. He had to get out of here before the monster Dee had summoned reached the tower. He sprang for the door ... and found his way blocked by the tall, cowled friar who had opened the abbey door for him before. A flash of lightning lit his face, and Will gasped in horror. It was Charles Roget--Lightning Hands himself!

"You! You scoundrel!" Will cried, backing away. "You followed me here!"

In answer Roget lifted his hands, rubbed his fingertips together, and flung a ball of lightning at Will. The missile hit Will square in the chest and sent him flying across the room, crashing into the wall. He slid to the floor and lay stunned, staring up at Dee and Roget.

"Why should I follow you here when this is my abbey? My dear friend Sir John Dee and I have been waiting for you. Waiting for you and for our honored guest."

Roget pointed at the window above Will's head. Looking up, Will saw that the honored guest had arrived.

The creature appeared to be an amalgamation of all the nightmares of the deep. Needle fangs curved down several inches below his chin, dripping with blood, perhaps from gulls encountered crossing the beach and going up the tower walls. His crimson-irised eyes seemed hot with hate, and their flame-pupils seemed drawn toward Will's tender lips. This monster coming through the window had the beak of a squid, the scales of a sea serpent, and thousands of trailing locks that were actually, on closer scrutiny, writhing eels festering on its head. Each of the eels had sharp, tiny fangs that seemed to incline toward Will as fermenting stench might be drawn toward perfume.

At the points of the thing's ears, red snake heads had teeth.

The thing was on him, its webbed hands closing around Will's throat. Its stocky body weighed enough that the impact when it landed on Will was crushing, nearly asphyxiating him as it almost merged him into the wooden floor. Before he could blink, the venomous fangs were in arteries in his neck, drawing blood out and replacing it with supernatural filth, sending shivers of excruciating pain down through his capillaries and nerve endings. Gasping, Will survived near suffocation, but then he nearly blacked out with revulsion at the thing's closeness, and his realization that fangs were in him.

He saved consciousness only with a steely determination to kill the swimmer. As to the vilest of blood exchanges, Will had no idea how long it went on, for time seemed both compressed and yet somehow elongated in this hell cell of a room. He could definitely sense that the newlood was ugly and stained. As the writhing eels began to chew at his face, he grew even more enraged. The swimmer was trying to mutilate his features in a way that would match them up with his obscene blood and might also make him hate himself the way the swimmer hated him. Worse, Will saw that the swimmer's features were becoming more human as he fed--not only more human, but more like Will's own features! The swimmer was trying to
steal
his beauty from him along with his humanity!

With this realization, Will suddenly found within himself a vast new strength, one he worried had something to do with the diabolical assault on him, but one he was going to make use of regardless. If it was too late to save his soul, it wasn't too late to save his appearance. Which, he realized, he might be living with for a long time now. Forever.

Will thrust the half-human, half-reptile vampire upward as if it were made of papier-mache, red-ribboned saliva dripping from its mouth onto his face as he did so. He gripped it by torso and neck in his newly steely arms and shook it violently back and forth in an effort to break its neck. He could hear by its breath, corrugated as if rough metal rubbed against rust in its throat, that he hadn't yet. So he bent it over the windowsill and tore its head back until he
could
hear, with a sound like a log being snapped in two, that he had broken its neck. He flung the carcass out the window. It fell onto the rocks below with an impact that seemed to make the tower shudder. Thunder had stopped and rain was slowing, and any liquid trace of the monster's existence would dry into extinction by dawn, Will thought with grim satisfaction.

With burgeoning confidence, he turned back to Dee and Roget and began walking slowly toward them. As he approached, though, Dee showed no sign of fear. "
This
is your immortality, son of the devil Will Hughes," he cackled, a grin smearing his features. "A vampire's! Courtesy of one of the most special vampires in the world, Marduk, an esteemed creature whom you've seen fit to treat so shabbily. And after the favor he did for you! Shame on you, Hughes. Marduk will be missed--if he is really gone," Dee added, turning to Roget. "Perhaps you ought to check,
mon cher abbe,
and see to the horses as well."

Will thought about trying to stop him, but let him go. His energy should be focused on this other fiend, Dee.

Dee continued lecturing Will. "You'll live forever of course, as long as you feed on blood at night and avoid the sun at all costs, for sunlight will burn you alive. Now I have a box and ring that will make me ruler of this mortal world, in addition to my occult kingdom."

Dee must have had a trapdoor of some sort behind the desk, for without another word he snatched the box and the ring and disappeared downward from Will's sight.

A vampire! Will knew something had gone terribly wrong but ... a vampire! In those first shocked instants he failed to think about how limited the places Dee could have escaped to were and let him get away. If Will had dared to think that he himself might have the power to fly, or to glide through the air for distances, he might have exited by the window and caught his tormentor. But he had not even dreamed about such powers yet. He simply wanted his stolen life back--Marguerite as his lover, her properteturn to her--for he knew he had been betrayed by Dee in the most insidious way, which included being tricked into betraying her.

He raced, torn and breathless, bleeding from various wounds, incisors already growing, down the pitch-black, airless stairs. The storm, or Dee in flight, had snuffed out the torchlights. Then Will wandered around the base of the tower, confused, eyes scanning the horizon fruitlessly in every direction. He heard the sound of horses and saw, on the promontory above the beach, the silhouette of a coach racing up the north coast road. Dee had escaped him.

Will felt a tingling in the roots of his incisors and touched those teeth cautiously with his fingertips. He recognized what was happening. "My Lord, I'm a night-sucking freak," he exclaimed, sinking to his knees in the sand. He raised his face to the sky and let loose an anguished scream, rending his shirt to pieces in his distress. Yet, even at this worst moment of his existence--a wretched existence that would now spin out for centuries--the gift of poetry that his mentor had bequeathed him did not fail him. He felt the words rising up in his throat as if they leaped into being along with his new fangs.

"My day now night, and night now day,

eternity's my enemy!

Instead of solace, treachery.

Instead of love, blood has its way!

I am transformed to fanged grotesque,

to stalker manic for new blood

to savor, drink, at any risk,

the thrill of veins my only mood."

When he had finished, he dropped his head ... and saw a glint of gold in the sand. Could it be? Will reached down quickly for the metal object, grasping it in a handful of sand as if it alone might save him. Yes, it was! In his flight, Dee had dropped Marguerite's ring! At least he had the ring back. With this he could try to approach her again! Perhaps she would know of some way to reverse this terrible curse. Or at least her companionship would make his existence bearable.

30

Signal

The trip to Poi
nte du Raz was fairly uneventful. We managed to hire a driver to take us when I balked at Will's suggestion that I drive the coach. We told the driver that Will was indisposed and needed complete darkness for the duration of the trip. Will gave him the directions he'd written out and impressed upon him the importance of sticking to the route, "even if you're told the south cliff road is out," Will insisted. Once we were inside the coach and Will had made sure that the curtains were securely tied over the windows, he retreated to a corner and, drawing his hood low over his face, fell into a sleep t thaso externally resembled death I had to resist the urge to shake him awake.