Hell on Earth

by Mike Wild

  One face, however, loomed over the town like a shadow: a narrow, bloodless, acutely angular face. The face that had captured the imagination of the world and that epitomised and haunted Whitby most of all.

  The nosferatu, Count Dracula.

  Bram Stoker had published his most lasting work in 1897, seven years after he had holidayed here, having found much of his inspiration in books he borrowed from the town library. It was here that he described the count first arriving on English shores, springing from a shipwreck in the form of a great dog. It was here that he had him feed on young Lucy Harker, bleeding her in the churchyard of St Marys, in sight of the abbey itself. These local associations had led some to conclude that Stoker's work was based, in part, on fact. That Bram had, in truth, found inspiration from things other than books. The fact and the fiction had blurred over the years, and a few people had even come to believe that Dracula himself was real.

  This was nonsense, of course.

  But there was no smoke without fire, and Jenny Simmons was in search of his kind.

  "Vampires? You're 'aving a laugh, love. That stuff's strictly for the tourists."

  Jenny Simmons took a look around the backstreet souvenir shop, saw the vampire capes and the fake blood and the plastic fangs, the tourist stuff, then slid off her sunglasses, smiled sweetly and let Baarish-Shammon out to play.

  [I haven't time to waste here. Do I look like a tourist to you?]

  The proprietor of the shop, a small and greasy man named Underhill, paled and dropped the piece of jet he had been prepping for sale. "Aww sweet Jesus," he said with recognition. "What are you? Inferaphim?"

  [Nohoho,] Baarish-Shammon chuckled deeply. [I'm something much, much worse. But at least your knowing that much proves you know your stuff.] Baarish-Shammon reached across the counter and took the man by his neck, squeezing mercilessly. [So, where are they, little man? Where's the nest?]

  The shopkeeper choked his reply.

  "Nest? I don't know what you're talking ab-"

  Baarish-Shammon shifted her grip to his Adam's apple and closed her fingers like a vice. She'd already sniffed out the fact that this miserable little bastard was supplying the local fangs with their meat - she just needed to persuade him that she knew.

  Gwork. "Please, you don't understand. Morla - she'll have my skin if I tell you!"

  [Not if I have it first.] Baarish-Shammon slid a razored fingertip down the side of the man's face, slicing effortlessly through his skin from temple to jawbone. As the shopkeeper's blood seeped slowly from the wound, she probed with her fingertip and gently teased back a flap of the flesh, baring the glistening red horror mask that lay beneath. [The Nest?]

  The man hissed in pain. "I can't... UWAGH... Jesus, you bloody bitch!"

  [Actually the literal translation of one of my many names,] Baarish-Shammon replied, consequently not offended. She repositioned her fingertip onto one of the man's eyeballs, prodding the razornail on the soft membrane. [Want to find out why they call me that?]

  "N-no... NO."

  [I thought not. The nest, then...]

  "Hsuh! The Overnook Hotel. West side of town. The attics."

  [Guardians?]

  "N-none that I know of. Morla Carmody, she-"

  [Thank you.]

  Baarish-Shammon and Underhill stared into each other's eyes, though his flicked desperately.

  "A... Are you going to kill me?"

  [Yes.]

  Jenny Simmons exited the souvenir shop in human form once more, the sign on the glass door behind her having been flipped to "CLOSED". Inside, the first tongues of hellfire had already started to lick at the stock. Jenny thought it appropriate that the place had kept a large stock of jet, the hard fossilised wood had once made the town the centre for the manufacture of Victorian mourning jewellery. In that sense, she supposed, it had been partly built on death, and so she was only continuing its long and honourable tradition.

  But wait. They had buried people in those days hadn't they?

  Not cremated. Oh well. Times moved on.

  Jenny walked across town, heading west, uphill. Behind her a tourist posed for a photograph under the arched whale bones that had identified Whitby to Ravne. The massive jaws had been presented to the town in 1963 by Thor of Norway, and it struck Jenny how much they resembled a pair of upturned vampire incisors. The centre soon lay far behind her, however, and with it the people. Away from the coast, it was deserted - only scattered and half-derelict buildings here and there. And then there was just one. The Victorian edifice called the Overnook sat atop an outcropping of rock and looked as though it ought to have a letter-box marked Bates at the bottom of its drive. It had probably once been grand, as many coastal hotels had been in their day, but now it was an empty shell - the victim, perhaps, of a poorly chosen location, or a juicy murder scandal from which it had never recovered.

  Whatever the reason for its failure, the hotel was fenced off and signed for redevelopment. But there was no evidence of work - and if it hadn't been redeveloped by now, it seemed unlikely that it was going to be anytime soon. Jenny studied a partially eroded sign: something Straker Estates? She hadn't heard of them. Chances were they were nothing more than agents for the Nest, tasked to ensure that the Overnook remained forevermore in development hell.

  There was a bit of a giveaway here. The fence had no gate anywhere in its perimeter. Why would overgrown bats need a gate, after all?

  Jenny ripped away a section of the corrugated iron fence and hurled it into the distance, the metal panel clanging as it bounced end over end across the field. There didn't seem to be any point in being subtle. She stepped through the gap, sniffed the air and smiled in satisfaction. There were undead here, all right, reeking, as always, richly of copper, urine and shit - none of the smells their own. Filthy bastards. They could at least bathe after they fed.

  But even though the fangs were here, there was no guarantee that they had what Jenny was looking for. That conclusion was actually something of a gamble, though it did have merit. When Ravne had pinpointed the town as the possible location for half of the artefact, Brand had done some digging into Crown Treasury records, seeking to trace the contents of Boswell monastery, particularly where they had gone after Henry VIII had closed Whitby Abbey down. It hadn't been easy gaining access - the Crown Treasury was understandably protective of its true worth - but if the enquirer knew the wrong things about the right people anything was possible, and Ethan Kostabi had furnished Brand with a marvellous selection of juicy tidbits. As it turned out, however, there was no treasure or artefact in the Crown's ownership that even came close to matching what they knew of "the Eyes".

  The conclusion, Brand had decided, was clear - while they were reasonably sure that the artefact had been in Whitby, apparently it had never left. It followed that if Henry VIII lost possession of it here, then something else had to have gained it. Something, perhaps, with the power to wrest such a treasure from the church. Something that had to have been here in Whitby at the time.

  By implication, something long-lived.

  Go figure.

  Jenny entered the derelict hotel through a half-hinged door and made her way across the lobby and up the sweeping staircase. She checked the rooms one by one, searching for guardians to ensure the shopkeeper hadn't been lying and she wouldn't be jumped from behind. She found it odd that he had thought there were none - every nest she'd known enthralled at least one guardian to protect its back. Because for all their power it remained a truism that vampires were not at their best in daytime - not helpless exactly but rather less of a pain-in-the-arse than when the sun went down.

  But just as the stiff had said, guardians there were none. Not a golem, not a ghoul, nor even a geek lackey with a suspect accent and a penchant for scuttling bugs.

  That meant one of two things. Either the fangs in the Overnook were more than usually stupid, or alternatively they felt they didn't need guardian protection at all. If it was the latter then it likely meant they had
enough confidence in their daytime abilities and their sire - the one called Morla - to render them potentially dangerous.

  Only one way to find out.

  Jenny located the attic access and ascended the stairs slowly, the slats creaking under her feet, the wood stained with blood - human Ronseal doing exactly what it said on the skin. As the shadows thickened, she came out into the attic proper. A twilit roof-space stretched ahead, pyramided with wooden beams and hung with the inverted shapes of large black tulips waiting to bloom. There were nine of them that she could see and probably more in the deeper shadows.

  They were not tulips.

  Jenny moved further into the space, between the hanging objects, watching them breathe shallowly, feeling brushes of their skin, leathery and hard, smelling their stench. Though their wings were wrapped tightly about their bodies and they were, for now, asleep, at some level they were aware of her presence because Jenny could hear them taking the telepathic piss. She sighed. What she hated about today's fangs was they had late night TV.

  "Oh my Gord, it's almost dark - we'll be waking up soon!"

  "Ven ve do, ze Count says grab her on tree... vorn, twoooo, tree..."

  "Children of the niight - what beautiful muesli she will make!"

  That clinched it, Jenny thought. If these bats wanted her for breakfast, they had confidence all right. She'd have to keep an eye open for Morla. But for now she moved in further, attention drawn by three more inverted but this time non-vampiric shapes hanging in the shadows.

  Shit. She could do without this.

  There were rucksacks and shredded CAT and Peter Storm gear all over the floor. The bodies roped up by their ankles were backpackers, then - two boys and a girl, all around nineteen. Both males had been exsanguinated, skinned, their genitalia torn off in the feeding frenzy they had suffered. The girl was alive, in shock, staring at the grey remains of her friends in silent, puff-cheeked horror. As Jenny untied her bonds, her gag, she spewed fleshy solids onto the floor. One way to keep her quiet. Chances were this was one hotel she wouldn't be recommending to the Lonely Planet.

  "Th-they said they were saving me for... they s-said... oh God, p-please... please help..."

  Jenny nodded towards the stairwell. "Piss off, forget your friends and don't look back. I'm not here for you."

  "But they'll come after me. They'll-"

  "They won't," Jenny interrupted.

  "Right," the girl said, "right." She made for the stairs, twisted trying to grab her clothes, and stumbled, falling heavily to the floor. "No, I didn't mean... God, did I make a noise. Oh, shit, I woke them didn't I? I woke them up."

  "No," Jenny said, matter-of-factly. "You have to do this." To the girl's horror Jenny punched the nearest vampire hard in the side, then did it again. "Yo, stoolbreath," she shouted. "Hey!"

  "Jesus, lady, what the fu-!"

  The vampire spasmed, hissing angrily, and black wings began slowly to open. There was a thudding of bare feet on the stairs and suddenly Jenny was alone.

  Kind of.

  One by one the vampires dropped from their beam perches and flipped upright in the half-second it took them to fall. Their taloned feet made no sound as they hit the attic floor. More sets of wings unfolded, revealing the emaciated-looking, sinewy creatures that lay beneath them. Red eyes regarded Jenny.

  "You've got some balls," one of the fangs said.

  "More than you can say for some."

  The vampire turned to where their victims hung, snarled. "You released her, you replace her."

  "I don't think so," Jenny replied. She allowed her own eyes to flash momentarily red. "I'm here on business."

  Most of the vampires had the sense to back off slightly seeing this minor display, even if only uncertain what they were dealing with rather than cowed. But there was always one - in this case the one who'd done the talking so far.

  It slashed at Jenny, slicing through the front of her blouse. It was an opening gambit.

  "I just bought that Armani," Jenny said. "Have you any idea how much shit you're in?"

  The vampire's eyes narrowed to slits, uncertain, weighing her. It was evidently not good with the mental scales because it lunged.

  A taloned hand shot out and stopped the vampire dead in its tracks, though perhaps not quite so dead as it would have been had Jenny stopped it instead. The hand casually flipped the offender aside and it crashed into a beam and collapsed to the floor. The interloper sighed softly, then, and began to circle Jenny slowly, sniffing like a dog.

  This vampire was larger than the others, quite considerably, and was recognisable as having been female, once. Powerful muscles bulged on her body and her leathery skin was a mass of scar tissue, sign that she had received, and met, many challenges in her lengthy undead existence. Such confidence came from this one that Jenny couldn't help thinking that if the other fangs had been comparable to tulips, she could only be the Dutch variety of that flower - the Queen of the Night. There was no doubt she was in the presence of the nest's sire, Morla Carmody.

  "Take care, children. Our visitor is more than she seems," Morla said. She stared Jenny in the eyes. "What business do you have... old one?"

  Jenny knew that this was the moment the gamble either paid off or didn't. She told the sire she had come for the artefact and carefully watched her reaction.

  It was hidden here somewhere.

  "I remember," Morla said. "A treasure such as that, one does not easily forget. Such power it held; I felt it even as I scooped that little man of God from the cliff top, the day they took their treasures away."

  Jenny sighed. "What is it with you leeches and sparkly things? You're bats, not bloody magpies."

  Morla thrust her face close to Jenny's own, her breath making even her gag. "Maybe we just sell them to buy mouthwash," she said. Morla pulled back. "Get out, hellspawn. Your artefact isn't here."

  "Yes, it is," Jenny said. "And I'm not leaving until I get it."

  Morla cocked her head, bared fangs whose edges were serrated. "Then you're not leaving."

  The sire flicked a talon and the other vampires pounced, led by blouse-slicer itself, vindicated and eager to kill. Jenny had no time to react as she was buried beneath their hurtling forms, and a small hill made up of leather, talons and teeth formed on the attic floor. But in the gaps that flashed between the vampire's bodies, where she expected to see flesh, there was instead a glow of hellfire, and a voice spoke just two words.

  [Bad move.]

  The vampires flew then, though none of them had used their wings. The undulating hill exploded outward as Baarish-Shammon launched the creatures into the air, then rose to begin a swift programme of disintegration and dismemberment. One vampire simply ceased to exist as it was hit by a blast of energy from the she-demon's eyes, another was decapitated in an instant by her razor-fingered hands. The same fingers jabbed into the stomach of a third, lifted it from the floor and then rammed it headfirst into the beam it had used a perch, slicing it apart on impact. A sharp slab of wood was used as a stake on the next, missing the heart but spinning the fang neatly, enabling the demoness to rip out its spinal cord. This she used to hang the fifth, wrapping the vertebrae around its neck and its wings before incinerating it as it scrabbled for purchase in the air. She made short shrift of the others, but as the last of them fell to her demonic assault Morla Carmody let out an ululating shriek that Baarish-Shammon recognised as a vampire's call-to-arms. This she should have expected - most sires were long-lived because they deployed their minions before taking to battle themselves, and that deployment wasn't over yet. The bitch had summoned reinforcements.

  Baarish-Shammon watched the skylight at the end of the attic darken and then shatter under the impact of more taloned feet. Brought forth from their hiding places in the adjacent cliffs, these fangs were obviously lower in the nest hierarchy but made up for their lack of status in numbers, and the demoness lost count of the creatures that poured through the gap. Her wide gash of a mouth curled into a smile.
Bring it on...

  The vampires brought it on. Holding her ground Baarish-Shammon entered her full hellfire mode, a roaring nuclear reactor on legs. She almost felt sorry for the poor bastards because she was going to enjoy thi-

  The attic filled suddenly with light. But this light paled even her own glowing form.

  Dammit, she thought. She knew that light. It was Wyrd Light. And where came Wyrd Light...

  She looked back to see Solomon Ravne had joined her in Whitby. The bearded creep was visible in the dazzling radiance as a stick-figure thrusting the object known as the Lamp of Alhazred towards the vampires. Though the initial whiteout from the trapezoidal lens was already starting to fade it was being replaced by strobing rays of intense coruscation that built in power and then shot out from the lamp one after the other like fusillades from some heavenly Gatling gun. All of the fangs who were leaping, flying or hurling themselves at Baarish-Shammon appeared to freeze in mid-motion, though in fact all that happened was that each of them were picked out at the exact moment of their death. They did not even have time to scream as they were reduced first to leprous lumps trailing flaps of their own necrotic flesh, then to gangly puppets of gristle and bone, then finally to sick yellowed skeletons that became dust as the moment was done. A solitary surviving skull thudded and then shattered on the floor at Baarish-Shammon's feet.

  The demoness stared at Ravne. [Bastard.]

  "Spoil your fun?" Ravne said.

  [They were only fangs. I could have taken them alone.]

  "That isn't in doubt. I simply thought that as we are working to a tight schedule I should save us both some time." He stared over her shoulder, nodded without much concern, shrugged and turned away. "That one seems hardier than the others - do your stuff."

  Baarish-Shammon raised a surprised eyebrow. It was obvious which "that one" was going to be and she turned to face Morla Carmody. Snarling, the sire was rising from a crouch in the dust of her children, her wings spread wide. She had taken some damage from the Wyrd Light, but nowhere near as much as she should have done. She should, in fact, have been dust like all the rest. Now that Baarish-Shammon found odd.