Older and Fouler Things (Jed Horn Supernatural Thrillers Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

  If it killed Charlie, and we failed, then I’d face the responsibility for my failure before the Throne. I prayed that God would have mercy on my soul if that happened.

  I took another step. The vampire narrowed its eyes. “You are a confident little creature, aren’t you?” it said. “Or perhaps you’ve realized the inevitability of the thing. The Ancient One has nearly cracked his mind open like a chestnut in a fire. Even if you get close enough that you think you can do anything to me, he will offer himself to me. He is gone.”

  It sighed, an affectation that I found just made me angrier. “If you only realized what insignificant insects you mortals really are,” it said. “I hardly realized it until my ascension, and I had been searching for a way to touch this kind of power for quite some time. You bow and scrape to the Crucified One,” it shuddered slightly as it said the closest it could come to pronouncing the Lord’s name, “in the hopes that He will reward you after your death. He does not care. He has never cared. He is powerless! Just look at how easily he was killed! Meanwhile, my masters have elevated me to what is little less than godhood!”

  “Well, that was an interesting amalgamation of bullcrap,” I responded. “Did that convince Trudeau? I’d thought she was smarter than that.” I honestly don’t know if I was just getting punch-drunk and cocky, or if I genuinely felt The Captain’s presence beside me. But I was tired of this cackling abomination and its games. “So, is He powerless, or indifferent? Can’t really be both.”

  Contrary to my hopes, it didn’t get taken aback. It studied me for a moment, its head tilted to one side, its eyes slitted but somehow appearing amused. “Your defiance is amusing, but pointless. You should beg me to spill your blood now, all of you!” It swept its gaze across the group of us. A brief glance to right and left showed me that the rest had caught up. We were now spread out across the neck of the rocky spit, facing the vampire. I didn’t know where the Worms were, but they weren’t interfering, at least for the moment. Maybe they were afraid to come too close to the water where their false god slept. “When the Ancient One awakes, it will be far better to be dead or one of my servants than to be devoured by its never-ending hunger! You think you will remain faithful, but wait until your mind and soul are being torn apart, as you endure tortures that would make the world’s worst mortal sadist vomit! You will beg for the Underlords to take your soul, only to make it stop!”

  “You really don’t know much, do you?” Ray said. “Charlie?” he called. “Can you hear me?”

  The vampire shook Charlie like a rag doll. “Does he look like he can hear you, fool?” it demanded. “He is lost to you! He is mine!” It spread its arms, effortlessly holding Charlie out at arm’s length, and screamed, “Enough! The time has come!”

  Before any of us could move a muscle, it had pulled Charlie in close, in an obscene embrace, his body between it and us. Its hellish eyes glittering over his shoulder, it opened its fanged maw wide.

  “Command him!” the voice in the dark insisted suddenly, though it sounded strangely muted and far away. It was still trying, but it seemed that Sam was keeping it off me a bit better since I’d thrown holy water at it. “Use the power! Control him!”

  The vampire clamped down on Charlie’s neck with its teeth.

  It wasn’t like the old B monster movies. It wasn’t just two nice, neat toothmarks, with a little rivulet of blood leaking out. It bit deep into his neck, its sharp teeth sinking into his jugular and his carotid both. Blood welled out from beneath its lips, pouring down Charlie’s side. His back arched, and I could see every muscle in his body quivering tight, like he was having a seizure. He choked, bloody froth spurting from his mouth.

  The vampire didn’t even need to inject venom after a bite like that. That would be a fatal wound even without it.

  It lifted him suddenly, blood flowing and pulsing from the deep wound in his neck, and held him over its head, turning its back on us disdainfully and taking a step toward the altar. It was going to bleed Charlie out on it, as its offering to the Thing.

  “Charlie!” Ray shouted, his voice echoing like thunder through the cavern. He held something up.

  It was Charlie’s crucifix, dangling from its broken chain. I hadn’t even seen Ray pick it up; I’d been somewhat preoccupied at the time. But he evidently had, and now he was holding it high, where it glinted in the bloody light.

  I didn’t know if Charlie could even hear him. But, somehow, as his head lolled, spilling blood down his cheek and into his hair, his eyes fluttered partway open, and he turned a little toward us.

  Maybe he could hear, past the pain, past the venom now coursing through his veins, past the fading light of blood loss, past the Thing picking away at his mind. I didn’t know. I started forward. One way or another, this had to end, before it could spill his blood on that altar.

  I stopped in my tracks, though, when Charlie reached out.

  It was unmistakable. It wasn’t a pained flailing or the flopping of a limp, dead limb. He was holding out his hand. And Ray flung the crucifix.

  Now, I probably wouldn’t have done that. I’m not sure Ray would have either, under any other circumstances. A sacramental is still holy, and you don’t cavalierly throw them around. But he did. The little, worn crucifix flew through the air toward Charlie’s outstretched hand. My eye was drawn to it, and as I watched it arc past me, somehow never once turning over, I couldn’t help but imagine that I saw The Captain’s hand guiding it.

  Or maybe I wasn’t imagining it.

  Charlie snapped the chain out of the air. Somehow, up until then the vampire didn’t seem to have noticed anything happening. Or maybe it thought that it was all a done deal. But it felt Charlie move, and it stopped, looking up, as he brought the crucifix to his bloody lips, kissed it, and then brought it down to press it against the back of the vampire’s neck.

  The vampire screamed then, and stumbled to its knees. Charlie went sprawling forward, tumbling to the ground in front of the altar. And the rest of us moved.

  Charlie was still clutching the crucifix by its chain, and no longer had it pressed against the vampire. But the creature seemed to be in shock, and it was slow getting up. Too slow. Father Ignacio was on it in a heartbeat.

  Praying aloud, he placed his own crucifix between its shoulder blades. It howled, bending forward until its forehead touched the ground, but it could not escape the weight of the representation of all it had rejected. It was pinned like a butterfly.

  Frank and I acted fast. Frank had taken to carrying a big kukri, and between that and my Bowie, we went to work.

  The old vampire’s neck was tougher than Trudeau’s had been. Maybe it was simply a byproduct of its curse. Maybe, the older and more hardened it had become in its sins, its unnaturally-sustained body had become similarly hardened. Again, I didn’t know. But I hewed and hacked at it as hard as I could, trying to get its head off before it could fight its way clear.

  The head finally rolled free, drowning in a cascade of dark, foul-smelling blood. It was as if the thing’s blood had been slowly rotting ever since it had become the cursed monstrosity that it was. We all staggered backward a step, gagging in the stench.

  Then Eryn ran past me, heading for Charlie, and I followed.

  He was fading fast. The flow of blood from his throat was slowing, the pumping spurts from his severed artery getting weaker.

  His eyes fluttered open as Eryn leaned over him, trying to staunch the blood with her hands. She was crying. My own eyes were stinging as I stood over the both of them.

  He couldn’t speak. But his hand slowly, weakly fluttered to his forehead. It nearly fell, then traced its way down to his chest. Slowly, agonizingly, he touched each of his shoulders, then his hand fell away, the crucifix still clutched in his palm.

  The blood flow stopped. He was gone.

  Something made me look up, squinting out over the lake. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that something might be stirring the water.

  Chapter 24


  I can’t say what I was feeling was despair, not quite. But it was certainly close. Had we gone all that way only to fail? Had Charlie’s death, even as he’d crossed himself as his last act, been enough to wake the Thing? It couldn’t be. I hoped and prayed that it wasn’t.

  As I stared, the water seemed to well slightly, a long wave reaching the shore, as if something the size of a whale or larger had skimmed close to the surface. I held my breath. But the waters settled and stilled. A moment later, the surface of the lake was as smooth as glass.

  I looked down at Charlie’s body. We probably should have taken precautions, just in case he suddenly awakened, his eyes filling with blood. But I knew that he wouldn’t. Charlie was dead. And that he had defied the demons and kept the Faith to the last was pretty obvious.

  Father was standing by the lakeside, holding up his crucifix and praying loudly in Latin. It was a prayer for the vanquishing of the Devil and all his minions, be they as relatively minor as sorcerers and witches, or as ancient and terrible as the older and fouler things that gnaw at the roots of the world. It’s not a prayer you normally hear in church, but it’s been preserved by the Order for over two thousand years, in one form or another.

  The ruddy glow was fading from the spit. All the illumination left was from our flashlights and the few guttering, fading green balefires up the slope. Ray was standing next to Father Ignacio, Eryn was quietly weeping as she arranged Charlie’s lifeless limbs, and Frank and Kolya, mindful that we were still right next to a lake where some ancient, eldritch abomination slept and only a few dozen yards from the Worms’ camp, watched our backs.

  I began to scan the darkness above for the Worms. The Thing had some kind of influence over them, even asleep. That much I knew. How they would react to the vampire’s fall, and its failure to awaken their false god, I did not know.

  There were a few of them in sight, barely visible except for their lamp-like eyes reflecting the flashlights in the dark. But the hordes of them that had swamped Miller under a tide of bodies were nowhere to be seen.

  I sincerely hoped that they’d all run screaming into their holes, fleeing into the dark from the strangers from above who walked with angels and archangels, and had struck down not one, but two vampires. Sure, one of them had been considerably weaker than the other, but they had still both been vampires.

  “We can’t leave Charlie down here,” I said quietly. “Not next to that thing.”

  “I’ll carry him,” Frank immediately offered.

  “We’ll all have to pitch in,” I replied, “and maintain security on the way up. It’s not going to be easy getting him out of here.”

  Frank nodded. “I know. But you’re right. We can’t just leave him down here.” That Frank was so devoted to getting the smaller man’s body out, after Charlie had ribbed him so mercilessly the first time they’d worked together, was a testimony to both men.

  Something made me look up again. One of the Worms was coming toward us. It took a second, in the darkness, to see that it was moving strangely, even for one of the troglodytes. It advanced in little jerks, almost like a video that was skipping. Its feet didn’t look like they were quite touching the ground. It was deeply disturbing to watch.

  It stopped a few yards away. Its eyes were glazed, unseeing. Its mouth dropped open. For a moment, it just stood there, then the loudest, most horrific noises started to pour from its gaping maw. It was not moving its lips or its jaw.

  If there were words in that blast of sound, I don’t ever want to know what they meant. It was an incomprehensible blast of pure noise. If madness has a sound, that was it.

  But even as it lashed at us, even as my head started to feel the same mounting pressure that it had before, I had had enough. I swung my rifle around, whipped it to my shoulder, and shot the troglodyte through the skull.

  Even in the dark, it was just close enough that it wasn’t a difficult shot. The thing dropped to the stone floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

  The rest of the luminous eyes in the dark vanished.

  Maybe there was another stirring under the lake. Maybe there wasn’t. We started sorting out how to get Charlie’s body out of there.

  We ended up putting together a sort of harness from Charlie’s belt and one length of rope that we hadn’t used getting down from the mine shaft. It wasn’t much, and it was still quite a chore to carry him now that he was dead weight, but we got moving.

  Ray led out, and diverted over toward the cup where we’d killed what had been left of Trudeau. He didn’t go all the way to where we’d left her remains; there was no call to. But he headed for where we’d last seen Miller.

  There wasn’t much left. There was a shoe, with the foot still in it. His empty pistol, completely covered in blood, lay against a chipped and blood-splashed rock formation. We couldn’t see much else in the light of our flashlights or Ray’s lantern.

  There was nothing to do but pray over the spot, and continue our climb out.

  Getting Charlie’s body up the cliff to the mine shaft was not fun. We finally ended up tying him to the rope, which was still in place, thankfully, and hauling him up once two of us had already gotten up to the shaft. Then we held him there while we let the rope back down for the others.

  After that, it was just a long, hard climb up the ladder. We had to stop to rest more and more frequently as we ascended; when we compared notes, none of us had any real idea how long we’d been down there, but it had been a long time since we’d had anything to eat or drink, and now that the adrenaline was slowly starting to wear off, it was taking its toll.

  It was a bedraggled, weary group that finally dragged itself out of the inclined shaft. The quarter mile to the mine entrance, while level, still felt like it was four times as long.

  Magnus and his knights were arrayed around the outside of the shaft, in their shimmering shirts, long, thin swords in their hands. Magnus turned to us as we staggered out of the mine entrance. The sun was just on the western horizon.

  “We felt something,” Magnus said, his voice haunted. “We felt it stir, and thought that you had failed.”

  “It stirred,” I said. “At least I think it did. But no, we didn’t fail. We stopped the vampire. With some help,” I added. I was under no illusions that we could have done it without the help from on high that we’d received.

  “We need to drop this shaft,” Frank said grimly, as he gently laid Charlie’s body on the ground. “At least make it harder for anyone to go digging for that thing again.”

  “I think I can arrange that,” Ray said tiredly. He looked at Magnus. “What’s going on up here?” he asked.

  Magnus looked out into the woods. “Those creatures of darkness that did not follow the vampire into the mine have dispersed,” he said. “The woods are clear, for now.”

  Ray nodded. “Let’s see to Charlie’s burial, then we can do what else we need to do.”

  Father Ignacio said a full funeral Mass, even as late as it was. When it was over, we buried Charlie in the meadow behind the house. His grave marker was a wooden cross that I had nailed together in the barn. It was the best we could do. Carved into the crosspiece, his epitaph said only:

  Charlie Parker. He Kept The Faith.

  We prayed the grave-side service, and lowered him into the hole that Frank and Kolya had dug. Then we covered him over.

  I’d talked to Ray about a marker for Miller. We didn’t know what faith he’d held, if any; his own words had suggested that he’d been a “None.”

  Ray had, reluctantly, argued against it. If anyone came looking for two missing FBI agents, presuming that they’d told anyone where they were going, then a grave marker might raise questions that we didn’t want to answer. For the moment, simply saying that they had ventured into the tunnels on a lead and had not come out again before the mine shaft collapsed would be, strictly speaking, the truth. I had to agree. It rankled, a little, but we were in a delicate position. We left it alone. The mine was Miller’s grave.


  After the funeral, and after getting some food and drink into ourselves, we all kind of went to our rooms in silence. It had been a harrowing week—we had discovered that we had been in the bowels of the earth for two days.

  Eryn and I sat on the edge of the bed, side by side, saying nothing for a while. She leaned against me, and I wrapped my arm around her as she laid her head on my shoulder.

  “Why?” she whispered. “Why did she turn like that? Why wouldn’t she listen to reason?”

  I didn’t answer right away. It wasn’t a question that really could be answered, not really. Trudeau’s reasons had been her own, and they had died with her. But I had to say something.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Except that I think that she equated God with the people who hurt her when she was young. She couldn’t separate the faith from those who professed the faith at the same time they violated its commandments. I think she’d gone farther down the road of hate and pride than we thought, long before the vampire started whispering to her. She was bitter and twisted up inside, and the forces of the Abyss took full advantage of it.” I sighed. “She was convinced, there toward the end, that only the monsters and the demons had power. She had shut her eyes to anything that had happened that demonstrated that God has infinitely more. I don’t think there was any getting through to her, even before the vampire bit her.”

  Eryn sniffled a little. “It’s so awful,” she whispered.

  I knew what she meant. There was little doubt that Karen Trudeau had been lost, body and soul. There was the faintest of faint hopes that something had changed, that in the brief moments of violence before her head had rolled free of her body, she had repented and begged for mercy. But it was a slim hope. Almost nonexistent.

  We stayed like that for a long time. As utterly exhausted as we all were, I doubted that we could sleep, not right away. The waking nightmares were still too fresh.