The Thirteenth Curse

by Curtis Jobling

“Um, shouldn’t we be heading down into the Undercity?” asked Max.

  “No, lad,” Crumb whispered back. “You’re lucky Clay lives up here. He’s one of the Roof’s oldest residents. There are few who know more about the world of monsterkind, and the comings and goings of the Undercity’s residents. He sees everything, Master Maxwell. He feels everything. If it weren’t for Clay, there’d be no Undercity.”

  “He’s a founder of the Undercity? You said all the bigwigs lived at the bottom of the abyss. How come he doesn’t live down there?”

  “You’ll see why, soon enough.”

  The pair ran out of the stairwell into a large, circular chamber where tiny torches sputtered from sconces in the damp, dripping walls. It appeared to be some kind of crossroads in the tunnel networks, all routes intersecting around a broad central column of compacted earth and rock. The entire height of this enormous earthen stanchion was covered in phosphorescent fungi of all shapes and sizes. Max pulled free from Crumb’s grip, causing the pawnbroker to spin about.

  “Hang on one monstrous moment,” said Max, a terrible thought dawning on him. “Every creature I’ve encountered since I turned thirteen has tried to take a piece of me. Why should this Clay be any different? Won’t he try and eat me, too?”

  “Unlikely,” said Crumb, looking back over Max’s shoulder down the dark stairs they’d exited. “He’s likely to have his hands full.”

  “He can’t drop what he’s doing to smite the last of the Van Helsings? What kind of self-respecting monster does he think he is?”

  The rumbling voice that sounded in the chamber was so deep it made Max’s teeth rattle. “The kind who has outlived countless generations of your fragile ancestors!”

  Max turned sharply to face the owner of the voice, expecting the newcomer to stride out of a tunnel mouth, but nobody appeared. Only shadows danced around the guttering torches.

  “Who said that?” Max asked, splashing through puddles as he backed up to the chamber’s mushroom-and-mildew-mottled central column.

  The pawnbroker turned Max around, directing him toward the source of the voice. “That would be Clay.”

  Max looked up at the pillar of packed earth. At its narrowest point it had the girth of a giant redwood, before broadening as it rose to meet the ceiling. Great branches of earth rippled outward, spanning the entire chamber roof, each “limb” loaded with mud and rocks. These arms snaked through and around the column, finding their way to the ground before spreading out along the chamber floor. The pillar juddered, a ripple running through its body and sending tiny flakes of damp earth tumbling down its trunk. Starting at the column’s heart, the strange fungi burst into color like tiny flowers, a vibrant red wave rippling toward its extremities. A dozen feet above Max’s head, a ragged, craggy mouth appeared in the shuddering mass of mud, more moist soil falling as huge eyes broke open. Max faltered back a step, making out more humanoid features within the support now. It may have once had legs, but they seemed to be now entirely fused with the stone underfoot. However, those branches were clearly powerful, prodigious arms, holding the ceiling across its shoulders.

  Max had never encountered one before, but he recognized the being from the Monstrosi Bestiarum: an earth elemental, as old as the world itself, should the legends be believed. They were guardians of the land, neither good nor evil, utterly neutral to the worlds that warred around them. There were other kinds of elementals, of course—those of air, fire, and water—each charged with protecting its own sphere of power.

  There were no notes in the monster manual that dealt with how to dispatch such an entity. Max prayed he wouldn’t have to find out. The monstrous column snorted, nostrils flaring as plumes of dust billowed over Max and his guide, making them cough fitfully.

  “Speak fast, little human,” said the column of earth. “Your enemies approach in swift and terrible number.”

  Max glanced back, half expecting a monstrous mob to appear at any moment. He looked up at the giant of soil and stone. “My friend said you could help me, Mr. Clay. Can you?”

  “Friend?” The earth elemental chuckled. “You have friends now, Odious? It would appear those upstairs are more accepting of your . . . improprieties than your brethren in the Undercity.”

  Max wasn’t sure what the creature meant by this, but he caught the pawnbroker’s shamefaced glare. It seemed the half goblin’s checkered past might have chased him into the human world at some point in time.

  “Odious Crumb has helped me,” said Max, drawing the monolith’s attention. “For that, I judge him a friend. Whatever he’s done in the past can remain there.”

  The earth elemental hummed, the noise reverberating through Max’s rib cage. “You’re confident, Van Helsing. Then again, your kind always were.”

  “You know me?”

  “The Mark is something of a giveaway, child.”

  Max did a double take. “You can see this . . . this Mark? But you’re not attacking me. What gives?”

  The ancient giant’s eyes rolled up toward the ceiling. “As Odious mentioned when you arrived here moments ago, I’m somewhat preoccupied. Even if I weren’t, I would not attack you, little hunter.”

  “Then you’re the first monster that hasn’t since I turned thirteen.”

  “I am compelled to do nothing, child. I act of my own free will. Some magic is older and more potent than that which burns upon you.”

  “Burns upon me? You’re speaking in riddles, Mr. Clay.”

  The earth elemental smiled. “Clay will suffice, Van Helsing. Now let me explain.” The sentinel’s mouth puckered up, crumbling lips pursing as if it might blow Max a kiss. Instead, a sparkling cloud of superfine dust erupted, showering the boy. The strange soil found its way into his airways, through his mouth, up his nose, and down his throat. Tiny particles of earth, stone, and silver swirled around the teenage monster hunter, whirling about him until the darkness turned into a blurred, blinding light.

  TWENTY

  xxx

  THE WITCHES OF GALLOWS HILL

  Max was lost. The world was insubstantial, ethereal; he couldn’t tell up from down. He held his hands before him, tried to focus on them, but there was nothing. Trying to clasp them together was no easier—his invisible limbs passed through one another, unable to connect. He had no body, no ground to connect with. He was mist caught in a cloud. The last thing he remembered was the earth elemental and the bizarro breath bomb it had launched in his face. Panic rose within him.

  Before he lost his mind entirely, ghostly shapes began forming in the white expanse of nothingness. Indistinct lines shimmered into life, transforming gradually into huge lengths of timber. These dark wooden struts connected with one another, forming the boards, beams, and eaves of a vast roof. The building grew around him, walls of stone taking shape as they materialized out of thin air. A bell tolled, dim and distant.

  Church. All Saints. Fallen Saints . . .

  Pews beneath him, rows of benches with people sitting upon them, a sea of bowed heads. Black dresses and coats, white aprons and bonnets. Puritans. A man stood within a pulpit before his congregation, flailing fists, gnashing teeth, castigating his flock. Fear and accusation. Fire and brimstone.

  Clay’s voice, in Max’s ear.

  “Gallows Hill, 1692. All Saints Church. The Reverend Udo Vendemeier, a holy man of Dutch descent, assumes stewardship of this tiny parish.”

  The preacher’s name instantly set Max’s nerves jangling, Helsey sense tingling.

  “You see the congregation, Van Helsing? These are good people. Honest people. Hardworking and God-fearing people. They listen to the reverend. To his words. To his claims. To his commands.”

  Max heard the screams now as one woman rose from the pews below, men seizing her and dragging her toward the church doors. The reverend pointed all the while, the good book shaking in his other hand, held high over his head.
>
  “What are they doing?” Max asked, but the elemental ignored him as the scene changed below.

  “She was the first. Many others followed. Vendemeier’s words are not questioned.”

  More figures vanished from the congregation below, as the voice of the boy’s companion rumbled through him. Still the preacher ranted and raved, his bony finger picking out women among the thinning crowd. No sooner would that crooked digit fix upon a soul than the damned one would burst into a swirl of black smoke, dissipating where she sat.

  “Awful words,” said the elemental. “Words of damnation. Words of death.”

  “He accused them all of being witches?”

  “Twenty-seven women were hanged during Vendemeier’s tenure at All Saints Church, their bodies tossed into the Witch River marshes.”

  Twenty-seven? Max knew of Massachusetts’s grisly past, the witch trials having spread across the state. Salem had most famously captured the imagination of schoolchildren and tourists down the ages, reveling in its terrible history. Twenty had been executed there. But twenty-seven, here in Gallows Hill? He’d never heard that number before. And now those horrors were being played out before him in some nightmarish vision.

  “I don’t understand,” he continued. “Why didn’t somebody stand up to him?”

  “One did, eventually. A stranger came to Gallows Hill, following Udo Vendemeier here from the old country. This traveler exposed him for what he was, a charlatan and killer. Vendemeier was a holy man, but no man of any god a good soul would ever worship. The women, and the anguish and sorrow that shrouded their wrongful deaths, were like nectar to the warlock. They were offerings. Vendemeier was a high priest of Hastur, the King in Yellow, an ancient deity spawned during mankind’s birth.”

  Max felt the elemental’s voice in his head, could taste soil in his mouth as if he were buried alive.

  “The God of Vampires, Van Helsing.”

  Max shivered. That familiar old word, so often associated with his family through the ages, ran an icy dagger down his spine.

  “Who was the man who took him out? This stranger?”

  A chuckle. “Not a man. Her name was Liesbeth.”

  “Liesbeth Van Helsing,” said Max.

  He knew the name well enough. She was the first Van Helsing to come to the New World, a trailblazer in every way. Liesbeth took the fight to the very heart of evil. A vampire killer of great renown, her personal crusade was against those who wronged women, a life’s mission that often took her away from the world of the supernatural and into the seedy heart of humanity.

  Below, the scene changed, a cloaked figure standing among the congregation, pointing a staff at the preacher. Men seized the ranting reverend from his pulpit, dragging him screaming, cursing, down the pathway between the pews. Max could have sworn Vendemeier was looking up at him as the mob half carried him out. The church vanished, replaced by tombstones and trees, bare branches speeding by beneath him, the wicked reverend still yelling obscenities up into the heavens. At Max.

  “He was taken to the place of his own handiwork,” said Clay.

  Suddenly, Vendemeier was hauled upright, kicking and struggling, lashing out at his captors as a rope was thrown over the buckled bough of an enormous, crooked tree. The stranger stood before him, her arms crossed over her chest as the mob went to work beneath a full moon. The preacher’s mouth worked feverish and fast as the noose was looped around his neck, the language unrecognizable to all but the stranger.

  “Liesbeth Van Helsing caught every word of that ancient language, heard every foul promise in the warlock’s curse. Vendemeier made a promise that night, child. One that would not be fulfilled until the sun set on your thirteenth year.”

  The mob hauled on the rope as Vendemeier rose into the air. Fire enveloped Max, blinding him, swallowing the gallows, the mob, the warlock, and the moon itself. Max was devoured by the bright light once more.

  • • •

  MAX CHOKED WHERE HE STOOD BEFORE COLLAPSING into Crumb’s arms. The pawnbroker shoved his filthy fingers into the boy’s mouth, scooping out soil. Max hacked and spluttered as the half goblin clapped the youth’s back. Out came the clumps of earth, caught there during the elemental’s arcane ceremony. Suddenly, Max could breathe once more, Crumb brushing the sparkling soil off the boy’s face and clothes.

  “What is it?” whispered Crumb. “What did you see?”

  Max pulled free of the half goblin’s embrace, turning to face the earth elemental. “Vendemeier’s curse. I heard him make it to Liesbeth’s face. What did it mean?”

  “Look into the pool before me, child,” said Clay, his eyes lowered toward the chamber’s largest, murkiest puddle. Max shuffled forward, stopping at the pool’s edge. He leaned forward, craning his neck to look down. His reflection peered back, shimmering as the ripples played across the puddle.

  “This is what we see,” rumbled Clay.

  Max gasped. A halo of fire suddenly sprang to life upon his head, a crown of flames that snapped and crackled. Max turned his head, the fire following each movement. He reached his hand up, fingers gingerly touching the blazing circlet, but he felt no heat or pain.

  “What does it mean?” asked Max, pulling his eyes away from the watery mirror and back to the earth elemental.

  “The curse translates as ‘Bane of Monsters’ in your tongue,” said Clay. “The Mark is invisible to the human eye, but every being you encounter outside the world of man shall see you for what you are: a monster hunter. Not only will you be exposed in such a fashion, but upon seeing the Mark for the first time, each monster you encounter will return to its most primal, base instinct: to kill. Even those you might consider your friends or allies.”

  Max turned to Crumb, who shrugged apologetically as Clay continued.

  “You’re Marked for death, Van Helsing.”

  “Tell me something I didn’t know,” muttered the teenager.

  “Very well,” replied Clay. Earth elementals didn’t do sarcasm, it appeared. “Vendemeier’s curse was answered by his god, Hastur.”

  “How?”

  “On the thirteenth birthday of Liesbeth’s thirteenth descendent, Udo Vendemeier would return. The child would receive the Mark, leading to his or her swift and bloody death by Vendemeier’s hand. This death would trigger the Age of Unlight.”

  “The what now?” asked Max, trying to keep up with the tale of his twisted family tree.

  “Age of Unlight,” whispered Crumb, dropping to his knees as if winded. His green face was drained of color, as if it was his turn to hurl. Screeches suddenly sounded from the stairwell at their backs.

  “There is a balance in both worlds at present, child. The scales tip back and forth in favor of good or evil, be it human or monstrous. But somehow, the scales are always righted. The Van Helsings have played their part in keeping this balance in order. On occasion, your forefathers have strayed down dark and bloody paths, their zealous crusades getting the better of them, but they’ve always returned from the brink. And now you—more than any of your kin—have tried to police that gray space between the worlds, the veil where monsters and humans mingle. You are admired by many, child.”

  “Good to know. So does that help me out here?”

  “No.”

  “Bummer.”

  “Upon your death, that troubled history of humans versus monsters will become quite irrelevant. The Age of Unlight will see the sun choked from the sky and the emergence of the foulest fiends any world has known. They will not be content feeding upon the flesh of humankind. Monsters shall face the same fate. Every living being above and below will provide sustenance for this greatest, most ancient evil. Hastur himself shall rise again, to sit upon his throne of blood. The vampires will hold dominion over all.”

  “If I die, Hastur rises?”

  The giant rumbled. “The King in Yellow may be risen alr
eady. He has been hidden for centuries, all of Vendemeier’s work supposedly leading toward Hastur’s summoning. Come the Age of Unlight, his vampires will be able to flood the earth, unhindered by the light of day. Your death would bring about an endless night.”

  “Okay,” said Max, clicking his fingers. “So we need to keep me breathing, yeah?”

  “In an ideal world, yes,” said the earth elemental, “but that may prove difficult. Your Mark—”

  “My Mark, yeah, I get that,” said Max. “So how do I get rid of it? I’m assuming if I lose the hot hat, then the whole of monsterkind might stop trying to kill me.”

  “There’s only one way of removing the Bane of Monsters,” said Clay. “You must destroy Vendemeier.”

  Max slapped a hand over his face and dragged it down. “But he’s already dead. How do I destroy a guy who was hanged over three centuries ago?”

  “The preacher was a warlock, remember?”

  “A male witch,” added Crumb. “Unlike those poor women, he was the real deal!”

  Clay rumbled before continuing. “His powers are staggering, well beyond those of his peers. His physical form may have been destroyed that night by Liesbeth Van Helsing and the people of Gallows Hill, but his spirit lived on. The man you encountered in the ruined church—”

  “Of course! The security guard! The note he left when he snatched Jed. Udo Vendemeier would be the UV, right?”

  “Correct. The guard is dead. His body is a shell that Vendemeier occupies.”

  “Okay, so the guard has to die. Again.”

  Even as he said it, Max could hear how ridiculous it sounded. More cries sounded from the tunnels behind them, causing Max to begin rummaging in his messenger bag.

  “For the world’s sake, I wish it were so simple, Van Helsing.” Another tremor passed through Clay’s body, causing clumps of damp earth to fall from the elemental’s torso and mighty limbs. The fungi glowed once more, the red lights fluttering within their pale flesh. “Vendemeier’s power comes from his own rotten heart, not the dead one that rests within the corpse he commands. You can break him, burn him, chop bits off him. But you won’t kill him. And if that body fails him, he will find another. The preacher’s heart is the key. Effectively, he is immortal so long as it remains intact. You destroy that, you destroy the curse. The heart’s destruction will also make him vulnerable to harm, even in spirit form. You just need to catch him before he finds another host.”