He stopped talking. As things stood, the story was unbelievable enough. If he continued, and told her he had actually been to The Blood and the Raven, and had encountered more vampires, would she believe him? Would that actually matter? People who had been killed years ago, that was a terrible burden for anyone to have to live with.
But now, today, more people were falling ill, and no-one could explain why. Then, there was the vision he saw at the window that morning. But he had destroyed her grave all those years ago, hadn’t he?
“And…the story turned out to be real. I met the vampires of that story.”
He pulled his dressing gown top downwards, showing O’Hara the damage done to his neck.
“That’s not a vampire bite, if that’s what you want me to believe.”
“No it’s not,” said Seth, “but it was caused by a vampire nonetheless. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”
“Not me,” said O’Hara. “But you can do something to help.”
“Have you not been listening? I desecrated her grave. But somehow, she is back, and I have no doubt she will kill again. How do you propose to stop a vampire?”
O’Hara paused before answering. If all this was true, then the traditional methods as espoused in the stories had not been effective.
“I need to research this some more,” said O’Hara. “But I will be keeping an eye on you too, Seth.”
At that point, a doctor burst through the curtains, and gave Seth the grim news.
“Mr McAndrew? Your fiancée has asked for you. I’m afraid there’s not much time.”
No Mercy or Compassion
Seth followed the doctor through to another ward. The doctor tried to make light of things, cracking a poor joke about how three people who were connected could end up in hospital in the same week.
“You said there wasn’t much time left? What did you mean, Doctor? She had a damaged arm and a split lip. You do know it was an accident, she told you that much, right? God! How much I hate myself for leaving her.”
“Couples have arguments all the time, Mr McAndrew. Whatever you two had together, you still have. Your fiancée asked for you.”
The doctor motioned to the ward where Rosalyn was located, and directed Seth inside. The situation looked normal at first glance. Rosalyn appeared to be sleeping.
“How is she? What’s her condition?”
“To be honest, we’re not sure, Mr McAndrew. She keeps losing blood. The human body holds eight pints of blood. Already today, your fiancée has had fifteen transfused into her body. It’s like something is draining the life out of her.”
“What’s going to happen to her?”
“We can keep infusing her with blood, but the hospital has finite resources. Frankly, if we cannot find out what is causing her to lose blood, she won’t survive much longer. I am sorry.”
Seth thanked the doctor, and sat down quietly next to Rosalyn.
Almost immediately, she opened her eyes.
“You came! Thanks, Seth.”
“Roz, it will be alright. We can fix this.”
“No, we can’t.”
The words hung in the air like a noose around Seth’s neck. He could see a very sore, open wound on her neck. His heart sank. He had been too late.
“She told me that you were to pay the price for meddling with her grave, leaving her nowhere to go but back to the Castle.” Rosalyn spoke slowly and deliberately, as if every breath was her last.
“Why you? Why didn’t she come for me? Why?!”
“Because she wants to see you suffer, just like you did when you were a teenager.”
To a vampire who is immortal, they have the luxury of time; something that humans lose a bit more of as each day passes. The vampire had bided her time, for the moment when Seth would be potentially at his happiest. She wanted him to succumb to her completely. By getting to Rosalyn, the vampire would get to Seth. He did not want to let her win.
“Rosalyn, look – we’ll just bring the date forward. We will get married this year. We will. It’ll be okay.”
Rosalyn smiled. She knew Seth had been terrorised in his sleep, and she forgave him for the accident. She had come face to face with the vampire after all. She wanted to tell him that she wouldn’t be leaving the hospital. For the young couple, there would be no church wedding. She did not wish to upset him any further.
He left her for the moment, and approached one of the doctors.
“Look,” he said, “I am taking up valuable bed space. Unless you have any real reason to keep me here, I need to go.”
The doctor checked his report pad and felt that with Seth’s blood pressure back to normal, that he could go.
“Roz, the doctors said I can go. I will just check on my father, and I’ll be back for you both later.”
Rosalyn nodded. She was exhausted from the blood infusions, which were becoming more frequent.
What a day it had been. Seth could not quite process in his head what was happening to Rosalyn. He could not contemplate losing her, nor cope with the fact that that same person who killed Daisy, was now killing Rosalyn.
A new horror visited Seth as he entered the room which his father was in. McAndrew Senior was staring at the ceiling, and his whole body was shaking.
“Dad! Dad! What’s wrong with you? I’ll call the nurse -”
But his father’s grip was strong. Seth looked at his arm, then at his father as he spoke.
“No nurses. No doctors.”
“But Dad-”
“She gave me a message for you. Just a few words. Three, in fact.”
Mr McAndrew continued to shake, and his eyes remained filled with terror.
“Listen, will you boy? She told me to tell you it has begun.”
“What? What has begun? Dad, you’re rambling.”
Seth knew full well that his father was not rambling. Scared? That was obvious. But he meant every word.
His father pointed towards the television, placed high up in the corner of the room. Seth turned it on, and the breaking newsroll confirmed his worst fears.
“The suspect first went into a coffee house, snapping one man’s neck, before driving her fist through his stomach and followed this by ripping the skeleton from his body. This newsroom was sent some mobile phone footage, but it is far too graphic for this programme to broadcast.
Described as female, 5’4” tall, with strawberry blonde hair, she would look human except for some obvious differences. Horrified onlookers described the suspect as having pale skin, black coloured eyes, and fangs protruding from her mouth.
She killed three more people in the coffee house before disappearing right in front of people’s eyes. This programme spoke with one person who had survived the encounter.”
‘She showed no mercy, and no compassion. She told us that none had been shown to her, and that the killing would not stop. Not now, not ever. We don’t know where she has gone, but you can bet on one thing – she will be back.’
Angry tears flowed from Seth’s eyes. Now he realised just how much he had to lose.
Seth made a return trip to Rosalyn, who appeared to be sleeping, which he hoped to God or some such entity that it was the case, but in reality her body was taking turns to slip in and out of consciousness.
He squeezed her hand, the one with the engagement ring on. It was obscured by tubes, plasters and angry veins in her skin. Rage filled within Seth. He should have stopped the vampire years ago. Now everything in his life that meant something to him, was about to go, and not via a natural death, which is something he could grudgingly accept.
The vampire had to be stopped. As veins in his own head began to pulse, his heart quickened once more. But this was not a recurrence of the palpitation he suffered earlier. It was excitement, caused by the knowledge that finally, this most awful of creatures would finally meet her end.
***
As he raced towards home, the home both he and Rosalyn shared, thoughts ran through his head. He
knew what the vampire was capable of, but there was one thing in his favour; she would not expect him to be capable of killing her.
“I made a mistake all those years ago, but those days are at an end.”
He gathered his bag of tools once more, before replenishing a bottle of holy water his mother had previously given him from her repeated trips to Lourdes. He never actually thought he would be using the stuff. His mother, who had retired to live in France after she split from Seth’s father some years ago, would no doubt be surprised too.
At least she was far away from the clutches of the evil vampire. Now Seth had only one problem.
Where the hell was she?
***
He decided, against his better judgement, to return to the cemetery. Maybe Ricky could advise him where vampires could be found, provided he wasn’t calling the police to have Seth brought in over grave desecration charges.
On arrival at the cemetery, things were eerily quiet. Of course, cemeteries were by their very nature the most quiet of places. But there appeared to be no-one in the place. Not a single car, nor lone person walking back from having placed flowers on a loved ones grave.
Even the cemetery office appeared to be deserted.
Seth was content about that particular circumstance, because he really did not wish to see Ricky again and his collection of dead dismembered fingers.
As he approached the vampire’s grave, a nauseous feeling filled his stomach. He had never done anything untoward in his life. But his fiancée was dying, and this creature was the cause of it. He decided not to feel bad about the damage caused to her grave.
How evil must she have been; that even the Dreymuirs could not cope with her?
As he stood once more over her grave, those words again:-
May she NEVER rest in peace
More than anything, Seth wanted answers. None were forthcoming. That rage engulfed him once more. He picked up the hammer from his sack, and smashed the head into the gravestone, again and again. Blood seeped from cracks in the stone work, and he waited for her to appear.
As his skin cooled, not through sweat caused by exertion, but that he was no longer alone, Seth certainly felt something had appeared from nowhere. With all his heart, Seth now wished he had time to grab the stake from his sack, turn around, and use the hammer to bury it deep into the vampire’s chest. But there was not enough time. There was never enough time!
The hammer would have to do. But before he chose to strike, he would make out that he did not know the vampire was even there.
Seth brought the hammer down on the grave stone one more time, screaming the F word as he did so. He was stopped in his tracks from taking action against the vampire, for it was a male voice that he heard.
“No. That’s not the way to do it.”
The voice did not belong to Ricky, so it could not be him. Then again, hadn’t Seth read something about how vampires can take any form? It was possible the wicked Gretchen had taken a male form. Yes, that’s what it was! Seth decided the original plan stood. He would turn around as fast as he could, and attack the vampire with all his might.
It might have been less than a second, but that was all the time the vampire needed. He grabbed Seth’s arm so tightly that the hand holding the hammer, limply let it go, much like a baby’s toy falling out of their pram.
“You’ve got to be smart. Cunning. Otherwise, she’ll remain twenty steps ahead of you. She’ll rip your head from its shoulders, scoop the insides out. You’ve got to understand your fear, in order to defeat it.”
Seth observed the figure in front of him. A man, of maybe twenty-five or twenty-seven years of age, yet he looked older than Seth in some ways. His cold, golden eyes betrayed he had seen more than seemed possible.
He was dressed all in black. A dark suit, and shirt buttoned right up to the neck. A ribbon much like a cravat hung from his neck. As for his pallor, it remained an absolute and unmistakable shade of deathly-white.
“You’ve got spirit, I’ll give you that much, but you’ll need more than that to defeat her.”
Seth grabbed the vampire’s arm, who laughed back at him, because his strength was obviously superior to Seth’s feeble power.
“Who are you?” demanded Seth.
“Who I am, is not really important. What is important is that I help you. Perhaps you and I will be the first vampire and human to successfully accomplish something together. For the record, my name is Darius.”
“That’s not a common name.”
“No, it is not. But one hundred and forty years ago, that was the name given to me.”
“How did you know my name?”
“You wanted help, now you’ve got it. I’m under instructions from Mariana Dreymuir. Walk with me Seth.”
“Mariana was supposed to do it-”
But the vampire cut him off, and ordered Seth to walk alongside him. Darius explained that he had lived in Charlecote when a group of vampires attacked everyone in the town. One of them, a female, killed Darius’ friends and family, only to let him live out his time as a vampire.
The problem was that she never gave him a chance, killing his wife who was pregnant with their unborn son. Seth asked Darius how he knew the child was a male, and he said -
‘because she handed his bloody foetus to me and laughed as she did so.’
Darius paused his walk for a moment, and pointed towards the chapel.
“We need to go there,” he said.
Seth was going to protest, stating that the chapel had only recently been re-opened after over three years of restoration work, but Darius cradled Seth’s arm by his elbow, squeezing hard enough for tears to leave Seth’s eyes.
Seth expected the door to remain shut, but Darius waved his hand so that a clicking sound could be heard. He told Seth that he would be able to go inside now, but that he would not be able to cross the threshold.
“What do you want me to do?”
“You will know, when you see it. I have waited over a century for this opportunity, and I will not pass up the chance to see her destroyed.”
“I don’t understand.”
Darius grabbed Seth by his throat and squeezed so hard that Seth thought he would die there and then.
“Do you want to die the same way that my wife died? The way your fiancée is dying? You thought by destroying that grave, you would have destroyed her. You fool. Those bones, if you had bothered to check them, are that of a man. Her grave is protected – in there.”
The vampire relaxed his grip, and Seth used his hands to feel around his throat, checking he could still breathe.
“I still don’t understand. You’re saying that the final resting place of Gretchen is in the chapel? A holy place?”
“Open your eyes, Seth! Look at the restoration to this building. There is no cross, and I would warrant that there are no holy articles to be found inside either. Whoever approved this is either being coerced by the wicked one, or perhaps is in league with her.”
“But her grave, and the dreams I was having-”
“-are nothing more than decoys intended to throw you off the scent. You want proof? Had you really destroyed Gretchen in her grave, she could not have hurt your fiancée. She intends to see you hurt – over and over again.”
“If what you say is true, I won’t simply be allowed to walk to where she is the chapel, and stake her heart. Whoever designed this would have set up many traps.”
“There’s only one way to find out, Seth. Whilst you dither on minutiae, your fiancée edges closer to her death.”
Seth could not be sure if Darius was leading him into a trap or not. He certainly could have taken any moment since they met to kill him, yet he had chosen not to do so. The story seemed plausible enough.
Inside, the chapel was quiet, which of course was to be expected. There were also several church pews, that too was to be expected. On the surface, things looked completely normal. Seth found himself wishing that he had tried to enter this chapel be
fore. In all the times he had been coming to this cemetery, and paying his respects to Daisy, he had never once attempted to see if the chapel could be entered in the daytime. He expected not, as chapels were like churches – except for services, they were usually shut.
Of course, at this time, the chapel was locked to outsiders, yet Darius had made it so easy for Seth to enter. The most obvious omission from the place was a cross. If a chapel’s interior was anything like a church; at the very least, there should have been a large church at the back of the place. Seth walked up to where the cross should have been, and though the plaster work was good, for someone like Seth, who liked to do home improvements by himself, he could see that the work was rather amateur. Perhaps whoever did this; did not intend for anyone else to see the interior of the chapel.
Dream the Crow's Black Dream - A Tale of Vampires Book Four Page 6
