Darklands: a vampire's tale

by Donna Burgess

  John led her down, his hand resting on the small of her back as if he was indeed poised for any attempt she might make to run. The downstairs was much as she imagined—a sprawling grand room that could have doubled as a hotel lobby, the warm wood floors worn dull with two centuries of boot heels. At the other end of the big room was another fireplace—this one large enough for Susan to step inside if she were to bend a little. The trim work along the tops and bottoms of the walls was wide, carved with minute details. All sorts of odd, surreal art work—oil, ink, photography—decorated the open spaces between furniture and windows. A large H.R. Giger print drew her eyes. How many people back in Hamilton even knew who Giger was? Even more books were stacked in the corners in precarious towers of dusty pages.

  The furnishings were elaborate, silk, damask and dark, heavy wood, some chrome, some glass. Nothing matched, but it all seemed to mesh, despite the lack of continuity. Everything had the appearance of age. Lovely was the best word she could come up with to describe the look of the place, despite the smell of dust.

  “It’s chilly out,” John said. He pulled open the coat closet nearest the front entrance, found her wool pea coat and helped her on with it. “We should have something to fit you better than this.”

  “It’s—mine,” she said. “I like it.”

  “Okay. There,” he said as he turned the collar up. He buttoned it at the throat for her, as if she were a small child. From his shirt pocket, he produced a pair of sunglasses with very dark lenses. “These will make it more comfortable for you on the outside. It’s not fully dark yet, but at this late hour, the sun will not harm you.” Carefully, he placed them on the ridge of her nose. “Eventually, you will become unable to stand any daylight at all. Enjoy the time you have left; it might be a matter of days. We’ll take a walk; I assume you are full of questions.”

  Susan nodded, somewhat amused by his doting and by his thoughts, which were no longer being guarded so tightly. His appraisal of her was sweet and flattering, and that made her feel good. Plus, his threatening demeanor had vanished. She realized that she was quite comfortable with him and in fact, even liked him. He put on a smart-looking leather jacket, and then led her out into the waning sunshine.

  ***

  John Moses loved the sun. Infinite dark blue and orange smeared the twilit sky, and for perhaps the millionth time, he doubted if he would ever decide to make the full transition. Daylight was just too precious. However, he was worried that the sun was still too bright for the woman.

  Once out, he caught her looking back at the building, obviously admiring the majestic façade of the old place. It was full of character and reminded him a little of the old places in Europe, where he once lived. Ornate molding, wide columns and even a couple of hateful, weather-beaten gargoyles loomed over the dirty street below. A long terrace overlooked the irate surface of the bay. This was one of the homes tourists often stopped to admire back in the city’s heyday, but those days were long gone, and many of the buildings now stood empty. Most could be bought for a song and not even a good one. When he “adopted” Devin McCree, he realized that he owed the man as much protection as he could offer. And the best solution, at least at the time, so long ago it was now fogged with time, was to leave England. They were hunted, Devin and his kind. The hunter was a man John hoped he would never see again.

  John knew only what Devin had told him of the woman. But seeing her in front of him, much of what he had heard seemed impossible. He remembered Devin returning home after his first night with her, a wounded pup with a hole in his middle. So distraught was he that John became worried he might never recover.

  They started along the sidewalk. It was still early, and there were few people out. Here and there, cars crawled along the damp street. Streetlamps flickered on—the few that had not been broken or burned out.

  “So, are we just going to stomp around in silence, or are you going to tell me why I’m really here,” Susan said, after a while.

  “You’re here because Devin has always wanted you. You know that.”

  Even in the graying day, John could see the color touch her cheeks. She looked down.

  They strolled around to the courtyard of the building, and he opened a tall iron gate with a key. This niche of nature in the middle of the city-stink opened to a lush, unkempt garden area. The foliage was still green, despite the cooler temperatures. The borders running just inside the iron fence were amazing boxwoods, grown thick and a dozen feet tall, that separated them from the concrete world only meters away. The shadows were as deep as inkwells where a stone bench sat, nearly hidden in a tangle of jasmine and thorny rose vines. John pulled away the ropes of vines, and thorns pricked his fingers like cat claws. He muttered a few half-hearted curses under his breath.

  Susan smiled tightly, and he knew she smelled his blood. “Careful,” she warned.

  When they were able to sit, John glanced at his hand. The thorns drew little dots of scarlet in four or five spots across his fingers and palm. Absently, he placed one bloody fingertip into his mouth and licked away the drop of blood. Susan wet her lips and turned away.

  “Now the rest, I don’t need to tell you, Susan. Think about what happened the night your brother died. Think about this.” He traced the fresh wound at her throat to prove his point, and she flinched away.

  “I’m only telling you in order to protect you. Perhaps you don’t deserve what Devin has put upon you, just as he didn’t deserve it,” he said. “But don’t deny the fact that you know what Devin really is. What you have become.”

  “Sounds like a lot of bullshit to me, John. Maybe I’m here because Devin wants revenge. Maybe he changed me to hurt me.”

  John shrugged. Her argument was half-hearted, only offered for the sake of not giving in without a fight. Susan was clearly not a woman who gave into anything easily. To humor her, he decided to play the game.

  “Think what you want. But, I assure you that Devin is not like that. He’s loved you from the shadows for more than twenty years, Susan. If he wanted you to suffer, he wouldn’t have intervened when you needed help.”

  Susan said nothing else. There was nothing more for her to say.

  chapter seventeen

  The guy’s name was Kasper Jacobsen, and he made Michael feel exceptionally insignificant, as he stood well over six feet, with a wide chest and big biceps. His eyes were the color of a cloudy day, and he had a week’s worth of gray-flecked stubble on his cheek. His hair was short and twisted in oily spikes like he had not seen a comb recently.

  Sitting under the dim yellow light at the kitchen table, he did not appear as deranged as Michael originally thought; only haunted. Perhaps Michael didn’t need to worry about whether he would kill him after all. At least, not yet.

  Michael didn't realize how famished he was until Kasper put a plate in front of him. Spaghetti and tomato sauce. He muttered a thanks and dug in. The pasta was undercooked, the sauce microwaved in the jar, but tonight, it was fit for a king.

  Kasper poured two glasses of red wine and pushed one across the table toward him. "Here. Drink up. And calm down." He took a drink from his own glass and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. "What the hell were you doing out there?"

  "I told you," Michael said, between forkfuls of pasta. "Looking for someone. My girlfriend is missing. I believe she might be here."

  "So you just decided to drive up? In the dark? You've lost your mind, yes?"

  Michael shrugged. "I have to find her."

  Kasper studied Michael a moment, then leaned closer. "Look at my house, Michael, and tell me, what do you see?"

  Michael stopped eating long enough to look around the dark kitchen. After a moment he answered, "You have your windows all boarded up."

  "Exactly,” Kasper said. “Those things, those creatures that attacked you, this city is crawling with them."

  Michael sat back and shook his head. "Those creatures? They were only men—" he began, but even as he said it, he knew Kasper was ri
ght. “Do they all act like that?” he asked.

  “No. No, of course not. It’s just that . . . some go crazy. Probably the ones who were unstable to begin with.”

  This made Michael think of Susan. Would she be one of those?

  "Besides, they’re not men. Not anymore. They might have been men once, but now they are something else." Kasper finished his wine and refilled his glass. "What do you do when you're not trying to get yourself killed?"

  "I'm a doctor. I have a family practice over in Reading."

  Kasper nodded. "I had you pegged for a doctor. My father was a doctor, also. He was a gentle man. Like him, it's not in your nature to fight. I can tell."

  “Physicians’ trait.” Michael couldn’t decide whether he should feel insulted or not. So he wasn’t exactly the Terminator. Instead, he went on. "Susan's a cop." From his shirt pocket, he removed a dog-eared photo he had taken of her out on the boat docks just behind their house and passed it over to Kasper.

  Kasper stared at it a long moment, then his brow furrowed a split second and smoothed out again. He smiled uneasily. "Pretty," he said, "but worth risking your life?"

  "Yes," Michael answered without hesitation. The warm, calming effect of the wine was taking hold, and he wanted to go on about what she meant to him, but held his tongue. He couldn’t impose his drunken pity-party on this stranger.

  Instead, he said, “Listen, do you know the name Devin? I’m not sure of the last name, but she woke me, talking about him in her sleep. Before you say anything, I realize how ludicrous it sounds, but I know he’s behind this. I’m not sure exactly how he’s connected to her, but I’m positive that he is.”

  Kasper’s eyes narrowed. "Devin McCree, maybe?"

  “Could be.” Michael helped himself to the wine, filling his glass nearly to the top. There was a pang of excitement, of hope, in his belly. Obviously, Kasper knew the man.

  However, Kasper's expression was not optimistic. "This is bad, Michael. Devin McCree, he is the vilest creature I have ever seen."

  "You know him, then. Can you take me to him?"

  "He is the reason my life is what it has become, the reason I am here in this hellhole of a city. But getting to him is not as simple as it sounds, or else I would have killed him a long time ago." Kasper raised his glass to his lips, and Michael noticed that his hands shook. It was only slightly, but this was the first indication that there were indeed cracks in Kasper Jacobsen's steely exterior.

  "I’ve chased that bastard from one end of this earth to the other. If your girl is with him, it will not end well. She will either be killed or she will end up like him—blood-thirsty and crazy. I cannot tell you which is worse."

  Michael pinched the bridge of his nose. A headache was developing behind his eyes, likely from the cheap wine. “Maybe if I had been stronger for her—“

  “It’s a disease, an addiction,” Kasper interrupted. “Love holds no meaning when it comes to this thing, Michael.”

  chapter eighteen

  1891. A tiny village along the Moselle River, Germany.

  Despite the fire in the hearth, it was so cold in the house that Kasper could see his breath. The fire provided light, and that was far more precious than warmth. It painted the small room a flickering, watery orange and made the round cheeks of his younger brother and sister appear like apples, barely ripe. They huddled closer to the flames, but he could not join them, yet.

  It was his turn to mind the window, what was left of the window. He had always thought a window was to allow in light and to offer a view, but the windows of his home no longer gave anything of the sort. These windows were boarded up, as if against a coming storm. He peered through a small opening he had left between two boards to survey the front of the little townhouse and the empty street beyond.

  Night was what Kasper's family guarded against. They would never again open their doors to the darkness. Two nights ago, their neighbor—a woman of about thirty and with a sickly infant—had come to the front door. She had called for Kasper's father. "Arzt, bitte. Mein baby ist krank. Doctor. Please! My baby is ill!" Brazen, she had pounded on the door. Ingrid, one of the twins and only six, had moved to answer, but Mother pulled her back.

  "No." she hissed.

  The pounding and shouting went on for ten minutes, perhaps less, but certainly no more. Then a shrill cry of pain ripped the night, a thud that made the door and the front windows rattle, followed by silence. After a moment, blood began to seep beneath the door, a slow stain that Mother wordlessly mopped away with an old towel. Through the split between the boards, Kasper thought he saw a familiar figure loping along the shadows, half-mad. Father.

  He didn’t mention it.

  Darkness was indeed the storm they guarded against. Darkness and Father.

  Kasper was tall for his age. At fifteen, he was the very image of his father, but he towered inches above the older man, already. He was handsome and strong of build. The girls had started noticing him, giving him shy smiles from behind their books, or behind their hands. Not that he had any concern over the fairer sex now that Father was gone. He had been dragged away down the dismal alleyway and into the night three weeks ago.

  Kasper had bigger things on his plate now.

  Many people were becoming sick, others dying. The population of the village had dwindled. It was popular to speak of illness—a kind of influenza, perhaps, or cholera, better than what they all really suspected—because what they suspected was fodder for penny-dreadful novels. Kasper's father, Lars, the only physician for miles, had been called out into the darkness. But there had not been an ill neighbor that night, only shapes waiting in the shadows like black ghosts.

  Kasper had gone with him. Luckily, he could make himself very small when he needed to, despite his lanky size. And that night, he had done so. Then, he had fled to hide by slipping into a big pile of rubbish outside in the back alley of a tavern. The stench had been horrible. His eyes had watered, and he had fought the urge to gag. Perhaps it was the rotting odor of the garbage that disguised his own sharp, acrid scent of fear that bled from the pores his skin.

  From his cover of trash, he watched creatures that looked like men drag his father away into the darkness. His father's cries were the dialogue that laced his nightmares.

  Now, it was his father whom he locked their windows and doors against. It was his own beloved father he waited for, a hunting rifle across his lap and a sharpened stake underneath his bed. He sat at the window and silently prayed that the moment would never come when he would have to confront the old man.

  Kasper was ruined now; that was the only word he could think of to accurately describe his mental state. He did not want his younger brother or sister to end up the same way. They had been fortunate enough to have been spared the sight of the last moments of his father's human life. As far as they knew, he was out hunting monsters and would eventually return, their wretched heads under one arm and a sack of treasure under the other.

  ***

  Father did finally return.

  It was easy enough for the creature that had once been their loving parent. He entered through the front door, asked inside by Kaspar’s mother. She threw her arms around him, and the smaller children cowered at his knee, hugging his legs tightly to them.

  Could they not see the changes in him, or were they so grateful to have him back that it did not matter? His kind face was roughened with a scraggly beard. His clothes were tattered and bloodstained, and madness glazed his eyes. He stunk of decay and death, the death of others on his dirty hands.

  Kasper did not approach Lars, instead hanging back in the shadows. He grasped one of the shortened wooden stakes behind his back.

  “Come here, boy. Have you not missed your father?” Lars Jacobsen grinned over the shoulder of his loving wife, revealing a wondrous set of very white, very sharp fangs.

  Kasper moved closer. His mouth was suddenly very dry, but his hands were slick with sweat as he clutched the oak stake. He licked his lips a
nd approached, wary, his knees trembling.

  “Father,” he whispered, “I can’t.”

  Lars squeezed his wife tighter against his chest.

  “Lars, dear one. You’re hurting—,” she complained. Her words were muffled against his dirty lapel.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Father.”

  “You can’t hurt me, you fucking pup.”

  “Lars,” Mother began. But in an instant, her words were cut off when Lars brought his hands up to either side of her head, his dirty fingers lost in the yellow curls of her long hair, and twisted. The snap was audible, audible enough to be the soundtrack of Kasper’s nightmares for the rest of his life. Kasper had waited too long to strike, and then it was too late, another thing that would dog his sleep for the rest of this life.

  His siblings, Markus and Ingrid, were still at Father’s knee, pawing at his trousers, vying for his attention, as Lars pressed his lips to his dying wife’s neck. Kasper heard the wet smack and the greedy sucking—a blood-wet soul kiss.

  Lars’ eyes rolled inward, blind with ecstasy, just as Kasper sprang, wielding the sharpened stake high above his head. He flew across the shadowy little parlor and roughly shoved his tiny siblings aside.

  “Hide! Now. It’s not Father. It’s a monster!”

  Lars let the white-faced corpse of his wife fall to the floor in a heap. He raised his head to look at Kasper. His mouth was a gore of red from ear to ear, like that of a crazed clown, against his complexion of white greasepaint.

  Screaming, Kasper plunged the stake into his father’s chest. The ferociousness of the attack threw the two against the front door. Kasper continued to force the weapon deeper into the chest of the thing that had been his father. His hands had become wet with the hot, viscous blood pouring from his father’s chest.

  He felt the stake exit Lars’ back and pierce the door. His father became still, pinned to the door with his head dropped forward. Kasper stepped back, bloody and breathless. Only then did he realize that Ingrid and Markus were howling in terror. He wondered if their cries would draw others like his father to the house.