The Triumph of Death

by Jason Henderson

  When she was done, she walked over to the table with the bowl, and daubed her fingers in the mash of wood and blood. She began to smear it on the table, creating a circle.

  “Mother Gretel, your daughter calls out to you,” Astrid whispered, and then she slipped farther into words that Alex did not recognize.

  The saltshaker began to quiver on the table.

  “Show us the home of this spirit, show us her place.”

  The saltshaker began to move, all on its own, traveling around the edge of the smear, which Alex presumed was an outline of the island. It stopped, shaking, quivering along the water, nearly tipping over as it began to spin. Alex thought it would explode right there, and then it shot into the smear, about a third of the way in.

  Astrid indicated its position. “Check that against the map.”

  “That’s incredible,” Alex said. “I’ve never seen anything like that.” He picked up the Polidorium tablet and showed her the Google World map of the Brough of Birsay. “That’s near the old English church—ruins of stones that we saw from the air.”

  He got up and rummaged around in the kitchen, continuing, “It’s a circle made up of granite stones. Maybe Polidori buried her near the stones. It would make it easier to find.”

  Astrid seemed pleased. “What are you getting?”

  “Something for your grievous wound.” Alex returned to the table and took her hand, looking at the cut. He tore open the Band-Aid he had retrieved and put it over the end of her finger.

  Astrid’s eyes seemed to sparkle as she trilled her fingers. “Well, thank you.”

  “So…” Alex took his hands away and started to drum his fingers on the table, stopping instantly. He got up. “So let’s go. We’ve got a body to find.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The Pictish stones of the Brough of Birsay stood guard over a patch of green earth fifty feet wide, and Astrid and Alex wandered through hurriedly after hiking across the fifty-acre island. Every few minutes, one or the other of them would stop to look out at the water and the dark shadow offshore, wondering if they would be discovered. They stopped in the middle of the graveyard—barely observable as it was, just a series of rectangles of worn low stones. A high Pictish slab stood at one end, before three long strips of stone in the grass.

  There was a ruined church nearby, roofless and mostly destroyed, its walls made of flat stones. That was a more recent building, but even it would have lain in ruins when Polidori was here. Alex was lost again.

  He threw Astrid a dismayed look. “All I see here are ancient stones. Is there any way we can do another incantation, something like what you did with the saltshaker?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not a bag of tricks,” Astrid said. “You know, I’m sensitive sometimes to spirits? But, Alex, I don’t feel anything here. Maybe because it’s so old.”

  “Wouldn’t you feel it?” he asked, searching. “In ghost stories a body that’s been moved always feels wronged because it’s not in its proper place.”

  Astrid shrugged. “Could be. But I’m not sensing it.”

  Alex backed up several yards from the circle, looking at the ruins as they cast their dark silhouettes against the gray sky.

  He studied the grass, watching its dips and hills, thinking of the letter from Polidori. Something had to give them a stronger clue.

  “The coarsest sensations of men,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Astrid said.

  “It’s a line that brings us to this island because it was used in the part of the book that was set on this island. But that’s not enough. You do the saltshaker magic and we get to this area, but that’s not enough.” He paused, thinking. “The coarsest sensations of men.”

  She put her hand on her hip and looked back at him, waiting for him to make a point.

  Once again Alex wished he had Sangster with him. He shook his head. Screw that. I can do this. “What is a coarse sensation?”

  Astrid went along with him. “Something…rough? Like rubbing a cat the wrong way?”

  “Yeah…” Alex trailed off. “Everything here is rough. Rough Viking ruins, rough ancient Pictish ruins, rough Christian ruins. So maybe something else, maybe rough like, rough, like nasty.”

  “Vikings were pretty nasty,” Astrid said.

  Alex nodded. He’d read about some of the ways Vikings slaughtered their enemies. “But sensation,” he went on. “That’s like a feeling—a coarse sensation, right? But sensation, what else does that make you think of?”

  Astrid thought. “Something amazing, or impressive, like a…spectacle?”

  “A sensation is a spectacle.” Alex nodded, circling again. “So what’s a coarse sensation?”

  “An ugly spectacle,” Astrid said slowly. “A debased, big, ugly spectacle.”

  “Polidori lived here,” Alex continued. “He had a hut here, which is gone now. But these ruins would have been here. He’s telling us to look for the place of an ugly spectacle. There’s only one thing I can think of that would fit that bill.”

  “Human sacrifice.” Astrid’s eyes lit up.

  “You said that pain leaves a mark on the world, is that right?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “Somewhere around here was a place of human sacrifice. Can you find that with your skills?”

  Astrid nodded slowly. “I can try.”

  “Do you have to…cut yourself again?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, a little distant. “I just have to be willing to…”

  “What?”

  “Feel it.”

  Astrid stepped away from him a few paces, turning her back to him as she stood facing the sea. She bent and took off her shoes, and in her bare feet stood still in the grass, surrounded on all sides by the legacy of ancient peoples.

  Alex thought he heard her whisper, Mother Gretel, open me up, let me feel, and then her whispers twisted into a language he couldn’t understand.

  The wind off the ocean bit his ears as it picked up, and he felt his flesh crawl, his mind tingling with something like the static. She was setting him off but in a different way. She began to tremble as she brought her open hands to her sides, and then her right arm shot out and up to her hair, and she pulled away a ribbon in one of her pigtails. The ribbon whipped in the wind and extended with her arm, flipping and pulling her hand off to her right.

  He heard her let out a tiny sob and let go of the ribbon, and it drifted, landing in the grass.

  Alex hesitated, and then Astrid started to walk toward the ribbon as it tumbled in the grass, finally catching in the crook of a stone.

  The ribbon flitted against a long gray slab with a stone marker rising out of it. Alex walked swiftly toward it and dropped to the ground, staring at the carvings. Etched into the slab he saw a tall figure leading his followers. It was Pictish.

  He was aware of Astrid dropping to her knees next to him, her hands in the grass. She wiped her cheeks. “Here,” she said. “There were so many of them here. Pictish captives. They knew they were going to die.”

  “You can tell all that?”

  “Only the feelings.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry you had to feel that.”

  “It’s worth doing, Alex.”

  He nodded and pointed directly at the base of the slab. “Then we dig here.”

  He rose and scraped at the earth with his heel. “Let’s churn up the earth around this wall.”

  Luckily the earth was soft, even a little muddy. For several minutes they scraped, kicking a few inches of earth.

  Alex used the stock of his Polibow to rip away at the ground at the base of the stone. After a moment he saw a sliver of blue—another ribbon, rotten and disintegrating.

  “Yes,” he said. He began to dig around the ribbon, tearing away chunks of dirt at least a foot down, exposing the ribbon as he went and widening the hole.

  He looked back, studying the space between the slab and the strips of stone in the earth nearby. Was there room for a
casket, even a child’s casket?

  Finally the ribbon ended in a knot, and Alex felt past it, swiping earth aside to reveal an iron ring. He brushed more dirt aside, exposing old, mottled metal. Breathing harder now, he began to dig and run his fingers along the metal, finding edges that he desperately tried to clear. “It’s a box,” he said. “Help me with this.”

  They tugged at the iron ring and wrestled with the box in the earth, watching the dirt slide away. It wasn’t a casket at all. It was a box about a foot long and seven inches wide.

  With a great heave they wrenched it free, and Alex fell back, sprawling on the grass before catching himself and setting the old metal box on the grass. Then he rose and kneeled next to it, Astrid joining him.

  “I don’t know. You think we should take it back to the lighthouse and inspect it there?” Astrid asked.

  “No way; I want in this thing.” Alex clawed at a rusty clasp on the front of the box. It was not locked. “Okay, this could be…I don’t know. It could be awful.”

  He breathed, flipped the clasp slowly, and pried the metal box open, forcing the ancient, rusted hinges. For a moment he hesitated, then looked at the contents. He saw a slim leather-bound booklet, held closed with a strand of leather, and a glass jar with a wide cork.

  Alex picked up the jar first, holding it up. It was impossible to see through a layer of dust that had caked around it. Alex swiped at the dust and held it up again, and watched as strands of sunlight glinted off a swirling lock of human hair.

  “That,” said Alex, “is DNA.”

  “What about the rest?” Astrid said. She picked up the book, which seemed to be only a few pages long. She undid the string and opened it. Alex could see the writing was a dramatic, clear longhand, in English.

  “‘On my greatest failure, a testament of John William Polidori. In 1822…,’” she read aloud, and then fell silent. “This isn’t right,” she said, handing him the book. “He’s your founder. You be the first to read it.”

  Alex’s eyes shot across the page. He did not speak again until he had read it through.

  CHAPTER 25

  “All that is left of Allegra is this.” Alex gestured at the jar with the book in his hands. The cold, damp wind lifted Astrid’s hair as she listened, and he handed the book to her.

  “Go ahead, read it,” Alex said. “But the gist is this: In 1822, John Polidori, the doctor who had worked for Lord Byron and broken off with him after Byron began to show signs of vampirism, was supposed to be dead. By this time he had already gone underground and formed the first team that would be known as the Polidorium. But he moved much of his work here, because he was determined to save Byron’s littlest victim, a victim Byron had not vampirized but had injured with neglect. Byron’s daughter, Allegra. Polidori bribed the nuns at the Italian convent where Allegra had been placed, where she was wasting away, and he took her himself.

  “Even as he gathered information on vampires and the movements of Lord Byron, Polidori fled the country with the five-year-old Allegra, and brought her to a modest home he built here, on the Brough of Birsay. Here he wrote letters to his growing list of comrades and researched vampires, and watched over the girl as she grew, not for a year or two, but for over ten years. For ten years Polidori stayed right here, studying and working by correspondence.

  “Right here,” Alex said again, pointing at the meager foundation in the shadow of the Pictish stones, “was the nucleus of the entire vampire-hunting organization. And then in 1831, he made a mistake. That year, nine years after he had fled, Polidori returned to England to bargain with Mary Shelley, to convince her to put clues about Lord Byron’s plans to rule the earth into the new introduction to her long-awaited new edition of Frankenstein. When he returned, he must have felt very satisfied. He and the now fifteen-year-old girl were living a happy life while he received letters from hunters around the world, and he sent clues as to the whereabouts of Lord Byron and the other vampires whom he would come to call clan lords.”

  Alex tried to envision this life as he spoke. Were there many visitors for him and Allegra beyond the mail that came infrequently? Local farmers in other huts, fisherman? Were they part of the community? The short testament did not say.

  Astrid was reading, but Alex went on. “It took another year for the catastrophic result of his visit to Mary Shelley to occur. The Scholomance, which Byron had taken over, tracked Polidori back to the Brough of Birsay and dispatched a small force to take vengeance. They did not even touch Polidori, though he begged them to. What they did was worse: They took Allegra.

  “After that, Polidori never forgave himself. He returned to Europe and redoubled his efforts. What I know from Sangster is that in the late 1800s he met Abraham Van Helsing and was able to prepare him for the attempted invasion of England by the clan lord Dracula. And Polidori did face Byron again, several times.”

  “And Allegra?”

  “Never heard from,” Alex said. “Who knows? Killed. Turned into a vampire, and then killed. But Polidori’s greatest mistake was also his gift to the world: the clues he planted in Frankenstein to warn of Byron’s return.”

  “I can’t believe she was alive when she was here.” Astrid was struggling with the same thing Alex was, that all this time they had been looking for a corpse, and it was a corpse that in all likelihood would never be found.

  “Can you imagine? Polidori glosses over it, but imagine you’ve raised a child as your own, and then see her taken like that—and you know what’s going to happen. If she isn’t killed, she’ll be perverted, poisoned, made to tear the flesh of humans, drink their blood. And you’re powerless to stop it.”

  “It’s horrible,” Astrid agreed.

  “Yeah, but you know what’s even worse?” Alex continued. “Polidori did all this work while he knew that the vampires were watching him. He could have sent Allegra back to Claire, but he took it on himself to raise her. He put her at risk, even more than Byron had with his neglect. He was fixated on his work, the way all of his organization is still fixated on its work. And what’s most disgusting of all—” He paused.

  “What?”

  “He left this.” Alex held up the jar. “The one thing we need to stop Byron or Claire from using the Triumph of Death. Hair, DNA, from their loved one. Most likely he even picked this place to live because of the ley lines here, because he thought this would be the place for the Triumph to be set off, if it ever was. So there you are: He’s overcome with grief, and he still thinks to leave us the hair.”

  Astrid put down the book. “You’re being hard on him.”

  “Only because I know the type.” Alex put the jar into his go package next to the vial gun. He heard them clank together. He felt weighed down by the jacket and the Polidorium, sullied by this work once again. He swallowed back an irrational welling of tears.

  Astrid went to put her hand on Alex’s shoulder, and he looked up at her, and if she was about to say something, it was interrupted when Alex gasped.

  An enormous red claw was swinging as a nuckelavee rolled up behind her, striking Astrid and then Alex across the head. He saw the earth he had disturbed rising up to meet him.

  When he awoke, the Brough of Birsay had been transformed into a world of ice and death.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Wake up, hon, or you’ll miss it.”

  Woozily Alex felt his eyelids fluttering, and there was something caked in them. He realized he was seeing through mud and blood that had flowed down from his head wound. He blinked again, forcing his eyes open as though they were encrusted with sleep.

  He felt numb, and cold, and didn’t wait to feel anymore because Elle was standing in front of him, the black marks around her eyes, a brown hood pushed back to reveal her spiky blond hair.

  Ask the questions.

  What’s going on?

  I’m in a room, white, ice, ice all around. Elle is in front of me and behind her I see sky. I see a wide window looking down on the island, and there’s a platform with vam
pires on it. We’re in an observation area, like a theater box seat. We seem to be in Antarctica—no. It’s the Brough of Birsay, and it’s covered in ice.

  Where’s Astrid? There, next to me—waking up. She’s against the wall with a skull vampire watching her, and Elle is pacing, and Astrid’s hands are…my own hands are numb, encased in ice.

  What do you have?

  “Hey!” Elle yelled, snapping her fingers in front of his face. “It’s time. You get to watch.”

  “Watch what?” Alex asked wearily.

  “Out there,” Elle said, pacing on the ice floor, pointing out the viewing window. “The Triumph? It’s about to begin.”

  Alex was watching past her, and even now he could see the platform where an even larger version of the satellite dishes in Bruegel’s painting had been erected, with stairs leading up to it, and a pulpit. There were vampires milling about.

  Everything ice. The island covered in it, this platform and box seat structure. “Icemaker did all this?”

  “Yes, he did,” Elle said. “Right here where the ley lines cross. I imagine the Queen would have done just fine on her own, but you gotta admit, Lord Byron lends a certain style to the proceedings.”

  Now Alex saw him, out the window and down below, about two hundred yards away—Icemaker himself, restored to his glory, his feeble leg replaced by an icy, thick hoof. He was waiting, like the rest of them.

  “So you were right.” Alex started moving his fingers, or trying to, but they were stuck. He didn’t have much time or they would be frozen and lost, and he tried desperately to play it cool while he cursed at his blood, praying he could move it into his fingers. He was in a sweater, his jacket on the floor in the corner next to his go package and Astrid’s bag. “She is a Queen, huh?”

  “The greatest we’re ever gonna have,” Elle said, “a master of magic and of vampirism.”

  “Haven’t we done this before?” Alex asked. “I don’t get why you don’t just kill me.”