Darklands: a vampire's tale

by Donna Burgess

  “I already have. A million times.”

  chapter forty-seven

  The music was a thousand hammers inside Devin’s head, shattering glass against his eardrum, intensifying the headache he had developed from the hunger. He was familiar with this ill feeling, this deprivation of sustenance. He wished there was another way.

  His craving was a mania, barely controlled. His hands shook, his back spasmed, and he breathed deep and long to curb the torture of muscle cramps. If anyone saw him now, they would assume he was a meth addict. When he passed the glass store and restaurant facades, the reflection was of a man he did not know. His face was too pale, shiny with perspiration. He huddled deeper into the warmth of his coat, but he could not get warm enough.

  There was a woman standing outside a forgotten wax museum with a bony hand resting on the shoulders of a girl. The girl might have been twelve, no more, but dirty-faced and emaciated, she appeared younger.

  As Devin moved closer, the woman shoved the girl toward him. “Twenty-five for the hour, handsome. I’ll throw in the girl for ten more.” Her sandpaper voice faded in and out with the bass beat of the music.

  Devin smelled both of them, sweat, filth, chemicals, but the odor of sickness radiated from the child. Cancer. Poisoned blood. Not that diseases of the blood would harm him. He was doing himself more harm by not taking her right then and there.

  “I’ll pay for both. But I want only you,” he managed. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his coat and found several bills. He passed the child a twenty, aware of the woman’s eyes on the cash, on the child. Obedient, the little girl turned and offered the money to the woman.

  “Here, Mom.”

  But Devin took her small, cool fist in his hand and folded the twig-like fingers around the money. “No. Not your mom’s. Yours. Go to that pub there and get something to eat.”

  “Mister, you ain’t…” the woman began. But her eyes met Devin’s, and her mouth snapped closed. “Go on,” she said. “You ‘eard ‘im.”

  The girl sprinted clumsily down the sidewalk in shoes too large for her feet. She would be better off without a piece-of-shit pimp for a mother.

  “A’right. Time is money, and you’re using up yours. Want to go back to my hotel?”

  Devin felt his stomach clench. His mouth watered, and he wet his lips again. “Here.”

  “Here? On the sidewalk?”

  He wanted to punch her for being so stupid. “No. Inside there.”

  “A weird one, ah? Too weird, and it’ll cost you extra. You’re good-looking, but nobody’s that good-looking.”

  At one time she might have been pretty, but now the red-haired woman reminded Devin of Judith, the woman who had initiated him into the world of night, and how she had sent Sara, her own tiny daughter out to seduce Devin with her feeble phony tears.

  Of course, he had come to love both of them as his surrogate family, though he was unable to replace his beloved Evie, Anna and David. They had adopted him, and he had adopted them.

  But, it was not meant to last. Before Susan, he had wondered if God had placed him on earth just to watch him suffer.

  Kasper Jacobsen, that bastard! He had tortured the three of them and so many others like them, in the name of the Führer. They called them superhuman—übermenschlich; they were experimented with. How much did it take to kill one? The Nazi forces could be indestructible on the ground. They all bore the mark of the Black Sun.

  The day had come when Kasper had determined it was worthwhile to kill little Sara. This was his bargaining tool. Kill the child, and Devin would agree to whatever he wanted—even turning traitor to his own country—in order to save Judith.

  He had paraded the child’s head high on the handle of a broom, terror still distorting her small face. How he had laughed.

  Devin begged him to let Judy go. He could not bear her tears and wails. But in the end, Kasper burned her, first drenching her entire body in kerosene and then setting her on fire. He had allowed the vampire to suffer more than a week, lying in pain on the concrete floor of a warehouse somewhere outside of Coventry and knowing she should be dead, yet unable to die. Finally, he buried her alive.

  Inside the warehouse, Devin had hung from a chain, the woman’s earth-muffled screams invading his conscience and unconscious mind until he managed to escape.

  He still had nightmares of being buried alive, lying beneath the cold earth, living but not alive. Had she been aware? Jesus, he hoped not.

  Was she still there in that prison? Was that her eternity?

  He still remembered the stench of burned flesh and kerosene. Kasper had assumed that Devin had been the child’s father and Judy’s husband, so he had forced him to watch it all, but he had saved Devin’s torture for last.

  ***

  The moon poured into the place in random gray streams, not quite lighting the corners, but making it a little less than pitch-black. Of course, Devin couldn’t have cared less; his night vision was as keen as a cat’s. The woman, however, stumbled over the prone bodies of the wax inhabitants, crying out in her sandpaper voice one bit of profanity or another with each step.

  The place smelled of mold and mildew. At the end of one narrow corridor, a lone “exit” sign glowed red, somehow still illuminated after all this time. The crimson light touched the woman’s face, casting hateful shadows in the hollows of her cheeks and temples. Her eyes appeared as black pits in the unflattering light.

  On one side of the corridor was the “House of Horrors” display. Jack the Ripper stood, stark-faced and staring in his Victorian top hat and wool frock coat, with a huge, bloody knife raised menacingly over his head. An old Catherine Wheel song that Devin recognized from a CD he had stolen a dozen years ago echoed through the walls from the club next door. Often, he found modern music distracting, but he could scarcely think of anything but tearing this woman’s jugular open and allowing the warm blood to jet into his waiting mouth.

  He swallowed, and his throat clicked dry as a bone. “What’s your name?”

  “Rain.”

  “Rain,” he repeated. Too pretty a name for such a woman. “Rain, why do you whore out your child?”

  Rain turned to him and laughed. “Don’t ask me that, beautiful. And don’t assume you know the kind of life I lead. We survive. That’s all we can do, now.”

  She sat down at the end of the hallway, beneath the red exit sign. Devin remained standing. Rain shrugged her oversized shoulder bag down her trembling, skeletal arm. “I have to fix, darlin’.” She gave him a sideways look. “You look like you could use a tweak, too, you know? I’m not selfish.”

  She pulled out a small, pink, plastic-framed hand mirror, a filthy razor blade and a tiny plastic bag of white powder. Without looking up at him, she began to cut her meth.

  “N-no. I’m not into that.”

  “Looks like ya are,” she commented. She pulled out a vial of water, a spoon and a syringe. “Only be a moment. S’down.” She patted the dirty red carpet next to her, and Devin sat down with a sigh.

  He rested his pounding head against the wall and watched the woman. She was as drab as a mop. She tied off by pulling one end of the elastic with her dirty teeth until some ghost of a collapsed vein appeared beneath her pocked inner arm.

  She slid the needle in, and Devin smelled her blood. There was only a small drop that pooled around the shaft of the needle. He wet his lips as the blood rushed into the already cloudy barrel and then flushed back away. Rain pushed her no-color hair from her bony face and glanced at him. “Sure? I’ve more.” She closed her eyes. “A little more.”

  Her lips pressed together until they appeared pale. Then, she removed the needle from her arm, snapped the elastic free and collapsed back against Devin’s side. She was rushing, and he did not like the feeling of taking someone who was toxic. The Germans had plied soldiers with the drug back in the war. Feeding from one who was polluted always made him queasy. He should have killed her before she shot up.

 
; But, he was in no position to worry about that now.

  “Ya a believer?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know.” He was not sure what she meant. “Are you?”

  The syringe fell from her limp fingers. “Used to be.”

  “Why not now?” His head throbbed in time with his heartbeat. His stomach clenched. He thought of Susan. He needed to find Kasper and finish things, but Jesus, he was having a difficult enough time finding the stomach to finish off this useless creature next to him.

  “Things change, y’ know? People change. People go away. Soon there’s a hole too big to climb out of, and ya learn to make that hole a home.”

  He laughed. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “Do ya, really?”

  “Yes.” Devin took the woman’s sharp face in his hands and kissed her clammy forehead. Her hair smelled like sweat and cigarettes, and he wanted to pull away.

  “I’m sorry, Rain,” he whispered.

  Her big, red-rimmed eyes met his for a moment, and he saw inside her mind, something he had avoided since finding her. She knew. She knew, and she wanted it to happen.

  “You’re one of them, ain’t you?”

  “Yes.” He laced his fingers through her greasy hair and pulled her head back, exposing her skinny throat to him. She closed her eyes, and he read happiness in her mind. He tore out her jugular with his teeth.

  A hot fountain of sticky blood spewed up onto his neck and chin, and he clamped his mouth over the wound, greedy for every single drop. He could spare nothing now. He held her so tightly to his body that her neck snapped backward. He was acutely aware of the moment when her thoughts stopped.

  Devin pressed his engorged member against Rain’s sharp hip and rocked against her as he sucked at her throat. Her fix affected him much quicker than he anticipated. He felt as powerful as a god, and suddenly, nothing mattered. Things were not so bad. He was something better than human. He laughed deep in his throat as he ripped at Rain’s faded blouse, tearing it wide and exposing a sagging pair of uneven breasts. He raised his head and glanced at his wicked audience of Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden and Blackbeard, all wearing even less blood on their hands and clothes than he. His reflection was like an apparition inside a wicked family portrait. Even in this House of Horrors, he was the real monster. He bent his face to Rain’s cool chest and bit down hard on one coffee-colored nipped. He shook his head from side to side and tore it away. He spit that morsel of flesh aside and lapped at the fatty tissue there until he felt satisfied.

  Finished, he rolled off of Rain’s motionless body. She stared upward, wide-eyed and almost pretty with her lips parted and paled to a flowery pink. His head no longer ached, and the shakes from hunger were gone. The only thing that remained was the residue of Rain’s euphoric high, which did not last. He sat back and wiped his mouth on the back of his coat sleeve.

  The child, Rain’s child, crossed his mind. Surely she would be better off, but who would she have, now? Maybe a vile mother was better than no mother at all. His own beautiful children played inside his head, David and Anna running along a bombed out street, seemingly ignorant to the destruction around them, so small and as fair as the ghosts they would soon become.

  Despair hit him like a load of bricks, and he brought his hands to his face. Would he be with them now? If he had given in, would he be with them now instead of living only in darkness, a monster? He pulled his legs up and pressed his face to his knees. The sobs exploded from his chest rather than his lips. He wept for himself and his lost family. He wept for Susan and what she might have been, had she not met him.

  chapter forty-eight

  Sandra led Michael over a rickety boardwalk that took them between the dunes and over the dune grass to the beach. Her worn-out loafers barely brushed the old wood, but the slats groaned beneath Michael’s weight. He stepped as lightly as he could, afraid he might fall through at any moment. The drop wouldn’t be a long one, but it would be incredibly painful all the same. The idea of impaling himself through the thigh or stomach with a splintered pylon was not especially appealing.

  “Don’t worry, Michael. It’ll hold,” Sandra rasped over her shoulder.

  Michael laughed nervously. “You’re telling me not to worry. Jesus.”

  He had left his flashlight behind in order to avoid attracting unwanted attention from anyone prowling around, be they alive or dead or undead. The moon floated ghost-faced through the gauze of clouds, stingy with its light.

  They descended an unsteady set of stairs. Where the flats used to reach the dunes, the beach had eroded from the passing of time and the onslaught of stormy weather. It dropped off sharply.

  “Be careful here,” Sandra warned, motherly. She leapt down the yard-high embankment as deftly as a cat. It was a surprisingly graceful move for a woman who, in life, had been a stationary, middle-aged housewife. Michael followed, fancying himself equally as agile, but knowing he was probably not even close.

  They started down the beach, Sandra’s fluid stride quicker than Michael’s. In the distance, a fire danced erratically beneath the pier, and a thin mist of rain sprayed into Michael’s face, so cold his cheeks became numb immediately. His eyes watered, and he took a swipe at them with the sleeve of his coat.

  His gun hung heavy on his shoulder, cool against his side, as close as love or death.

  “Talk to me, Michael,” Sandra said. She sounded like she was crying.

  “I don’t know what to say.” The fact was, he had plenty to say, but most of it was too awkward, or maybe even too sentimental, to say aloud. His stomach clenched with anxiety.

  “Your voice is shaking,” Sandra commented.

  “I’m freezing,” Michael answered. “Why are you walking so fast?”

  “I’m not having second thoughts, if that’s what you mean. I just . . . I want to be out of sight of my home. Ghosts linger there. I don’t want them to see this. They may haunt you when you return.”

  Michael pondered this a moment. Normally, the idea of ghosts was about as likely as Santa Claus, but then again, so were vampires. Normally. What a laughable idea. There was no “normal” anymore.

  Sandra slowed her pace and allowed Michael to catch up. Her face was cast in shadow, the gnarled scars of her cheek and head hidden from view. Michael almost wished that was not the case. What he was about to do would be easier if he could see the monstrous side of this vampire. From this side, her face was homely, almost attractive.

  “They hold no animosity for what you did?” Michael asked.

  “The love of a child is unconditional, my dear. You know that.”

  Michael frowned. “How would I—“

  “You do. Weren’t you a child once?”

  He shrugged.

  Sandra went on. “You’re a good man, Michael, too good to have seen what you have seen. Too good to do what you are about to do. But, it is that same goodness that drives you to do what you are about to. There will be a time when you will have to do it again.”

  Michael was not so sure how good he was. Lately, he felt like a shit most of the time. He was happy Sandra was rambling on. It would make things easier.

  “You will carry the scars forever, you know. You’ll never be normal again.” There was that word again. He was beginning to wonder if there was even a reason to strive for such a tepid life. Nice and normal. How drab and boring he must have appeared to Susan, and to everyone else in Hamilton. No wonder she had left.

  He bit his lip and reached under his coat. He lifted the gun to his waist and thumbed back the safety. He could not mess this up; Sandra Harp deserved to go quickly, despite what she had done. In the end, it was an act of selflessness, not evil.

  “I can read your mind, Michael. Make it quick. Make it—“

  In a crimson explosion, it was over. Sandra collapsed in a heap. Where her head had been was nothing but a plume of steam rising into the cloud laced sky.

  “Oh, shit,” Michael whispered. The riot gun fell from his hands a
nd swung on its tether at his side. The world shifted and swirled and he struggled not to pass out. He had seen as bad in the E.R.

  But not by my own hand.

  He tasted blood on his tongue. He had bitten a nasty little gash into his bottom lip.

  The waves, always constant, now washed over Sandra Harp’s lifeless body. She would become food for the creatures, quickly picked clean to the bone.

  “I’m sorry, Sandra,” Michael said. He thought again about Susan. He couldn’t do this to her. He didn’t think he could do this to anyone else. He yanked the gun from the end of the strap and flung it into the dark ocean. Later, he would realize it was a stupid move, he was positive of that, but he was not that kind of man. He was no killer, even if the things he should kill were no longer human.

  Slowly, he walked back up to the woman’s house where he would search the shadows for the ghosts of her family. Perhaps her ghost might appear there, as well.

  ***

  The stench hit Kasper before he reached the corner of the next hotel. With his acute sense of smell, he was like a shark and could pinpoint when only a drop or two reached the surface of the skin. But this was not just a few drops, or even an open wound. This was something huge—the stink of a slaughterhouse, the gamey metallic fragrance that filled the air when he was around and doing his job properly. He removed his gun from the confines of his bulky overcoat and peered cautiously around the corner.

  Lying on the weed-covered parking area between two dilapidated hotels was what Kasper first thought was a man, lying naked and curled into a tight fetal position, facing away into the shadows. However, moving closer, Kasper found he could not find the sharp edges of his thoughts. The naked creature was not a man, but a Deathwalker.

  He lay in a pool of congealed blood that stretched from his shoulders to his ankles. The reek of regurgitated plasma and bile lingered all around him. There was a sick realization as Kasper stepped closer—he had never seen this before, but knew it was not out of the realm of possibility. This foul creature was devouring himself.