His Vampyrrhic Bride

by Simon Clark

  Tom stood there, panting. Perspiration rolled down his face.

  ‘Helsvir, come away.’

  He aimed the flashlight in the direction of the voice. This was a voice he knew and had been longing to hear. ‘Nicola!’

  As he stood there, he witnessed an apparition. A beautiful apparition, at that. But one so unearthly, and so eerie, that shivers danced across the sensitive skin of his neck.

  The woman he’d searched for stood on a cottage roof not thirty yards away. She remained perfectly still. Her blonde hair shone in the light of the lamp. The blue fire that was her eyes gazed out over the flooded village.

  She is beautiful. She really is.

  Tom knew that a vital change took place inside of him at that moment. This was such an uncanny setting. Yet Helsvir, the drowned homes, and the oppressive darkness amounted to nothing in comparison to what he experienced now. He’d found Nicola. And he’d found a shining truth. He realized his love for her was so powerful, so real, so immense that nothing must stop them from being together.

  He thought: I love you. We’re going to spend the rest of our lives under the same roof. That certainty was indestructible.

  ‘Stay there,’ he called. ‘I’m coming over to you.’

  He ran along the wall, following that gleaming route of white stones. Within thirty seconds the wall had taken him to the house where Nicola waited. Deep water still lapped against windows and gurgled around walls, but he hardly noticed the flood now, because he’d spotted a grouping of outhouse roofs that formed a series of steps, allowing him to reach the cottage. Soon Tom was bounding up thick red tiles to Nicola.

  Sheer exhilaration carried him up the slope. Seconds later he put his arms round her. ‘Thank God.’ His heart pounded like fury. ‘Are you alright? You’ve not been hurt?’ He crushed her against him. He could feel her ribs, the cool wash of hair against his face; her subtle perfume filled his nose. This was a sweet moment . . . an incredibly sweet moment. Emotion blasted through him, and all he wanted was to stand here on this roof and hold her hard against his chest.

  Only after a few moments did he realize that she wasn’t responding. She didn’t even seem to know he was there.

  ‘Nicola? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Helsvir,’ she breathed. ‘Helsvir. Be gone. Don’t hurt him . . .’

  He looked into her face. The blue eyes gazed across the rooftops.

  ‘Helsvir, be gone.’

  ‘Nicola. It’s me – Tom.’

  She stood there without moving. There was something strangely stiff about her body. As if an electric current ran through her muscles, turning them rigid. Her eyes didn’t even glance in his direction once. They remained fixed, unblinking. A gaze that remained locked on the heart of a great darkness.

  ‘I’m here, Nicola.’ Gently, he hugged her. ‘I’m here. I’m staying with you. Listen, I love you. We’re going to get married. And I’m going to fix all the problems. Everything’s going to be alright.’

  She gave a slow blink. ‘Tom.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s me: Tom through and through. The Tom-shaped boy.’ He knew he was talking nonsense. That didn’t matter one little bit. The words were a tender stream of reassuring sounds. He wanted her to feel safe. ‘We’ll go to my house. There’s food, clean clothes. Everything will be good. We’ll lock the doors and keep the world out for as long as we want.’

  ‘Tom?’ Nicola seemed to be waking up from a deep sleep. Only, she wasn’t fully there yet. A dreamy quality possessed her. ‘I’ve had such strange dreams . . . Helsvir.’

  ‘You called him off at the last minute. Otherwise I’d be . . .’ He shrugged. No need to finish that particular sentence.

  ‘Helsvir. Yes . . . but how can you know what I was dreaming about?’ She sounded so sleepy. ‘You wouldn’t know about my dream. Helsvir swam down the river. Into the village . . . Then I saw you.’ She smiled. ‘And here you are.’

  Nicola’s head rested against his chest, her eyes half closed. She seemed deflated somehow. All the strength had been drained right out of her. Gently, he eased her down until she sat on the roof tiles, her legs resting on the downward slope. He sat beside her with his arm around her shoulders.

  For a little while she spoke in a sleepy voice: ‘Helsvir isn’t real, you know? My ancestors made him up hundreds of years ago . . .’ She snuggled against him in such a wonderfully relaxed way. ‘They invented stories about how Helsvir was created by the gods to protect them. They told the story to their children . . . to reassure them . . . so they’d sleep all cosy in their beds. I feel cosy now. It’s lovely being with you, Tom.’

  She lifted her head, kissed him softly on the cheek before allowing her head to sink down against his chest again, as she drifted in and out of sleep. And there they sat: side-by-side on the roof.

  When Helsvir had swum towards him just a few moments ago the terror had overwhelmed his senses. He’d frozen up. His body seemed to set solid. He couldn’t move his legs; his heart had pounded furiously against his ribs. Now, after the emotional storm, there was a sort of calm. Maybe psychological overload had caused a partial shutdown of his mind to protect his sanity. The panic had left him. His heart resumed its normal rhythm. In the circumstances, it would be entirely understandable if he screamed about creatures built from human body parts; however, he had no inclination to rage or yell. Instead, he accepted that this must be part of the human instinct for self-preservation. When faced with the extraordinary, deal with it in a practical, level-headed way, otherwise you really will end up losing your mind. During his training as a diver, he’d been told often enough that panic is a killer. And that whatever dangers you do face underwater, you must always keep your nerve.

  Perhaps that training had imposed a calming influence. Yes, he now knew that Helsvir was real. So he hadn’t been hallucinating after all when he’d seen the brute attack Bolter’s gang at Mull-Rigg Hall. What’s more, he really had seen those stark, white figures on the hill that Mrs Bekk had declared were her vampiric children.

  Then, in a day of bizarre events, came an equally bizarre moment. It could have been a symptom of the enormity of what he’d experienced tonight screwing up his emotions, but Tom felt almost happy. Maybe love really is a type of madness. Here I am with Nicola, and everything feels alright with the world, even though it clearly isn’t. There’s the flood, and there’s a monster out there – and I don’t care. I don’t care one bit. It’s like I’ve been searching all my life for something that’s incredibly important, only I never knew what it was. But I’ve found it now. And it’s Nicola Bekk.

  A sense of tranquillity settled over the flooded homes. He wondered if the shock of nearly being killed had driven him insane after all, yet it felt so beautifully peaceful to be sat here with his arm around Nicola. A warm bubble of security enfolded them.

  They remained like that for almost an hour, Nicola resting against him in a drowsy state that seemed closer to sleep than being awake. Then something changed. The sounds of the water were different. Instead of random lapping sounds, or the soft gurgle of liquid swirling around walls, there came a rhythmic splashing.

  Tom instantly recognized the sound. Oars. Definitely oars. Somebody rowing a boat.

  What he saw quickly bore this out. For, coming round the corner of the flooded road, was a small boat. A figure sat there; the head rose and fell as the figure steadily rowed by street lights and the tops of road signs. A lantern hung from the boat’s prow, creating the effect of a vessel drifting along in its own pool of amber light.

  Without any fuss or sense of urgency, the boat drew closer to the building.

  Then a man Tom had never seen before turned to look up at him. His skin was a smooth ebony black. He wore white-rimmed glasses. There was the white collar of a priest around his neck, and both the bone-white glasses and priest’s collar shone brilliantly in the dark.

  He gazed at Tom for a moment. ‘I am collecting lost souls,’ the man declared. ‘I will collect the pair of you.
’

  ‘We’re OK here.’ For Tom, sitting with his arm around Nicola, even in this bizarre setting, was a slice of pure heaven. ‘We’ll wait for the waters to go down.’

  ‘The flood is getting higher,’ announced the man. ‘Even though the rain has stopped, water is still decanting from the hills. Therefore, I invite you to step into my little ship. I have a place of safety for lost souls such as you . . . and I.’ He smiled. ‘Please come along. Otherwise I cannot guarantee your safety. In other words, you and your friend will die, sir. You will die.’

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Ancient Greeks believed that after they died a ferryman took them across the River Styx to the afterlife. Tom Westonby sat in the back of the small boat with his arm around Nicola; she rested her head against his chest as she slept. Without much of a mental stretch, he could imagine that this dark-skinned man was that ferryman – and they were crossing over to meet the Greek god of death.

  The priest applied the oars to the water with a slow, rhythmic action. The village that had been drowned by the Lepping looked so tranquil in the moonlight. The upper parts of houses were mirrored by the floodwater. As the boat drifted through a surreal, half-submerged landscape this could have been the final journey from the world of the living to the realm of the dead.

  The priest regarded Tom through those white-rimmed glasses. ‘You keep looking at my head.’ His deep voice was as relaxed as his work with the oars. ‘You know, when I started shaving off all my hair my wife said to me, “Joshua, your head now looks like a bowling ball. If your head should ever fall off those shoulders of yours, someone could stick a finger up each nostril, then pick up your head, and roll it at a set of bowling pins.”’

  That was an extraordinary statement to make to a stranger. Tom found himself staring at the dark, round head of the priest.

  ‘So I am the man with the bowling ball head,’ declared the man. ‘I am also the parish priest for Danby-Mask. That makes me the Reverend Joshua Gordon Squires, though I’d like you to call me Joshua. Not Josh, however. Josh is the local dialect word for “joke”. For example, “Dear God in Heaven, is this a josh? You have flooded the village that I love. If you are joshing then I don’t think it is very funny.”’ He shot Tom a sharp-eyed glance. ‘So, stranger, what’s your name?’

  ‘I’m Tom. Tom Westonby.’

  ‘Ah, the famous Westonby family from Mull-Rigg Hall?’

  Tom nodded, then asked the question he should have asked before boarding this little craft on its night-time voyage, ‘Joshua, where are you taking us?’

  ‘To safety. I don’t know what you were doing with the lady on the cottage roof, but this is a dangerous place tonight.’

  Tom thought about Helsvir. Instead of raising spectres about a monster that might be lurking under the boat at this very moment, he said, ‘This is Nicola Bekk. I came into the village to find her.’

  ‘Ah, the equally famous Bekk family. Yes, I’ve heard a lot about them.’

  ‘Any of it good?’

  ‘You challenge me, Tom. I respect that. Because you suspect I believe any toxic gossip that comes my way. However, my job, and my nature, demands that I see good in people – until they prove otherwise. I am also open-minded. Absolutely open-minded.’

  ‘So where are you taking us?’

  ‘It’s the river that’s doing the taking. I can’t row against such a powerful current, so we’ll head for the parish church.’

  ‘It’s surrounded by water. We’ll be trapped.’

  ‘Think of it as a safe island. A sanctuary. What’s happened to your girlfriend?’

  ‘She’s exhausted. She might be in shock, too. Her house is gone.’

  ‘Ah, the demon flood.’

  ‘No, some lunatic burnt it down this morning.’

  ‘Flood and fire. Dare I say it? We have disasters of a Biblical nature.’

  Nicola stirred sleepily. ‘Tom? Have we just made love?’

  Joshua diplomatically glanced back over his shoulder as he rowed, as if to be sure of the way.

  Tom gently tightened his arm around her. ‘Joshua is taking us to where we’ll be safe.’ Even as he spoke, he remembered what Nicola had told him. That as a little girl she’d been terrified of the Christian church. She’d even believed that the carving of Christ being crucified on the Cross was a warning of what the villagers would inflict on her. That she’d be nailed to the wood, too. Tom wondered what her reaction would be when she entered the building that had been the seat of Christian power in the village for the last thousand years: the Church of St George – the slayer of the dragon.

  Just a hundred yards away stood the church. Its white stonework evoked a ghostly aura in the moonlight. Tom saw that the floodwater had stopped just a dozen feet from its walls. The church had been spared because it had been built on a mound of earth. However, the churchyard hadn’t been so lucky; that had become part of the new lake.

  Joshua sat facing Tom and Nicola as he worked the oars. ‘You could help by guiding me in,’ Joshua said. ‘The water only just covers the gravestones. Some are pretty sharp – I don’t want any of those blessed things puncturing the bottom of our little ship.’

  Tom gently laid Nicola down on the seat plank in the stern, then carefully made his way forward to the prow.

  ‘You move well on a boat, my friend.’ Joshua’s large, round head nodded in approval. ‘You are a seasoned boatman?’

  ‘I’m used to working on small dive boats.’ He found himself smiling at the man. ‘The first thing you learn is not to tip the thing over.’

  ‘Ah, then we will work well together . . . we lost souls of Danby-Mask.’

  Tom found himself liking this quirky character with the deep, rumbling voice. Now that he’d moved to the front, where an old-style lantern was giving off its soft, amber light, he could see Joshua better. He judged the man to be anywhere between forty and seventy. The round, smiling face didn’t have any lines. No wrinkles at all. While the dark eyes behind the white-rimmed glasses suggested that here was someone of gentle wisdom. Yes, he liked the Reverend Joshua Gordon Squires. Tom decided he could trust the man.

  Tom said, ‘Take her in slowly over the churchyard wall. It’s only a few inches under the surface.’

  ‘Ah, take her in. All boats are female, aren’t they?’ Joshua grinned, displaying an astonishing set of teeth. ‘If we treat her well, she might be kind to us.’ His hand patted the woodwork. ‘But, like a woman, we must never take her for granted.’ He laughed softly. ‘OK, Tom Westonby. Be my guide.’

  Tom leaned out over the boat’s prow. Just a couple of feet below him was the floodwater. Beneath its surface were submerged gravestones. And beneath those lay hundreds of the Danby-Mask dead. They’d been collected into this hallowed ground for centuries.

  ‘Keep moving forward, Joshua. Slowly does it.’

  The priest dipped the oars, gently propelling the boat towards dry ground.

  ‘Just pull with your left oar.’ Tom had spotted the stone hand of an angel, thrusting upwards above the surface. ‘Now straight ahead.’

  Lamplight filtered down through the water, turning it pale yellow. As he gazed down into the murk he found himself expecting to see Helsvir suddenly looming into view. The boat seemed breathtakingly fragile – a little wooden box of a thing floating on this vast lake. The monster could smash it to pieces in a second.

  A stark, white face stared up at him. His heart lurched. Then he sighed with relief. This was the marble face of a statue that adorned one of the big old tombs.

  To his surprise, his voice remained calm as he talked the priest in closer to the new island that lay in the centre of the village. ‘I can see the footpath now. Just keep on this line. That’s it, nice and easy with the strokes. Nearly there . . . nearly there. OK.’

  As the boat’s prow scrunched up on to the grassy slope that rose towards the church, Tom jumped clear. After that, he hauled the boat further up on to dry ground.

  ‘Here we are,’ declared Jos
hua, sounding pleased. ‘We are on higher ground in more senses than one.’

  After the priest had climbed from the boat, Tom tied the line to a tombstone, then he collected Nicola. For now, he didn’t need to worry about her reaction to entering the Church of St George, the dragon killer. She was deeply asleep. As he carried Nicola towards the church door, Joshua walked alongside, carrying the oil lamp.

  Joshua paused at the doorway to look back along a street that now resembled a canal. ‘I am expecting another boat soon with more lost souls. You see, some people are reluctant to leave their homes when the flood comes . . . understandably so. They want to fight nature in order to protect their property.’ He regarded Tom with those wise eyes of his. ‘I can tell you are a man who will fight for what he loves, too.’ His gaze settled on Nicola.

  ‘You’re right. And I’m never going to stop fighting.’

  ‘I wholeheartedly approve.’ Then the man’s smile was replaced by a deadly serious expression. ‘You know, Tom. There is something else out there in the water: something other than that boat with more of our stranded friends. I’ve seen a leviathan in our village. I don’t know his name . . . but if I chose his name I would call him Death.’ Joshua’s shrewd eyes read Tom’s expression. ‘You know him too, don’t you? You’ve seen Death roaming this place.’

  Tom held Joshua’s steady gaze. ‘Yes, I’ve met him. He isn’t Death, though. His name is Helsvir, and he’s worse than Death. Much worse. What’s more, I don’t know if there’s anything on earth that can stop him.’ He glanced down at Nicola’s sleeping face. ‘But, as you rightly say, Joshua, I am a fighter. So I’m going to kill that thing out there. Or die trying.’

  He carried Nicola into the church. The moon shone through a striking image on a huge stained-glass window. The significance of the scene depicted wasn’t lost on Tom, because there was St George in golden armour. He was driving the point of his lance into the heart of the dragon.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  The interior of the church captured the essence of tranquillity. Although Tom Westonby suspected this peaceful interlude would be brief. The final battle was coming. Soon there would be blood.