The Blood Line

by Ben Yallop

  He liked to keep to himself. Even the officers steered clear of him now and were wary of him. He took a last drag on his cigarette and flicked the butt into the water. 'Bub' they called him. It was a stupid nickname, supposed to sound childish and demeaning. But Bub knew that it was actually shortened from Beelzebub, the name of the devil himself, because the officers found him so troubling. One officer had said to his own superior that it was the devil's own job keeping ‘Bub in line. The name had stuck. And actually, Bub kinda liked it, being the devil. Better the bad guy than the boring good guy.

  Just then he became aware of a commotion behind him on the other side of the ship. As he straightened and turned there was a bright blue flash as if there had been a lightning strike, but the day was not stormy and there was no crack of thunder. Intrigued he wandered over, across the deck of the SS Andrew Furuseth, towards where he could see a number of his fellow sailors pointing and calling at something ahead. As he crossed the deck it rocked underneath him as a series of waves caused the ship to move.

  Looking on past the other men he saw that another ship had drawn up alongside them, a little way off. That was strange. He hadn't seen it approach. It was a proper warship, a destroyer escort. Like the Furuseth it looked pretty new without the typical rust marks which often marked such ships. Bub came to the side, the other men made way for him, eyeing him warily. 'What's going on?' he said to the man next to him.

  The other man looked briefly torn between not wanting to speak to him and wanting to impart some exciting news. After a seconds hesitation the latter impulse won through.

  'That ship. It just appeared. It wasn't there two minutes ago. There was a bright blue flash and then it just … it just appeared.'

  Lieutenant Commander Beeson appeared out of the crowd of men then. He had a loud-hailer in his hand and he used it to call across to the other ship.

  'Hey! USS Eldridge. Is there anyone aboard?'

  They all stood silent for half a minute, listening, but no answering cry came back. No-one was visible on the deck. A ghost ship.

  Beeson turned around to look at the other men, apparently at a loss as to what to do. However, he recovered himself and seemed to come to a decision when his eyes came to rest on Bub. The other sailors quickly made a space around him.

  'We need to head over and see what's going on.' He brought a finger up to point at the most unpopular man on board. 'Bub, you can go.'

  It was only a matter of minutes before Bub found himself bobbing alongside the ghost ship, the USS Eldridge, in an inflatable boat with one of the other men. He was able to get a rope and grapple over the side of the ship and then he began to haul himself up. As soon his feet were out of the inflatable the other man sped off, back to the Furuseth, leaving only water below Bub as he climbed. Bub cursed him but eventually he reached the top and pulled himself over the edge to land on the deck.

  This was not going to go well. He rubbed his shoulders, tired from the slow climb up the rope. He stepped over the body of a man which looked as though some nightmare demon had shoved an arm up inside it and pulled the poor sod completely inside out. He was more a pile of gore in human shape than a body. Bub crouched down for a closer look. Fascinating, the body was indeed turned completely inside out but with no sign of any cuts or other damage. Blood ran away to the edge of the deck and down a gulley there. There was a lot of blood. Loads of it. Bub stood, watching it trickle away.

  'What do you see?' came the voice of Beeson on the loud-hailer.

  Bub just raised an arm and waved dismissively as he headed towards the door which would take him inside and to the lower decks. Let them wait. Dorie Miller, the hero of Pearl Harbour, would have just walked straight in without fear. Well, so would Bub. Distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety. He’d show them.

  He opened the door and descended steep metal steps into a dimly lit corridor, using legs hooked over the handrails to slide quickly to the bottom.

  The next body he found was missing everything above the waist. It was simply a pair of hips and legs, still clad in crisp white uniform, although heavily stained with blood. It was as though some giant pair of scissors had snipped the body in half, so neat and straight was the cut. But if the top half of the corpse was still around Bub couldn’t see it. In fact, he couldn’t see much of anything with so little light. What on earth had happened here? He heard a sound ahead and he crept along the metal corridor.

  The next man he found was still alive.

  His arm was trapped in the very wall of the ship. Otherwise he seemed to be unhurt although he stank of fear and vomit.

  'What happened?' said Bub.

  The trapped man shook, his eyes unfocused and febrile. He gibbered.

  'Wh...w…w...w...how…d…d…did…did we?'

  Bub ignored his ravings and inspected where the arm was stuck inside the wall. Interesting. It was as though the metal had melted and the man's arm had been pushed inside before the wall cooled. But there was no sign of any melted wall and the man's arm was not burnt. It was as though the ship had just formed itself around him. Ship and man had fused and become one when the ship had mysteriously appeared. What was this? Some kind of secret military experiment gone wrong? This was almost like magic. An entire ship suddenly appearing out of nowhere with a maimed, deformed and dead crew.

  The trapped man had a name badge. Bub ripped it off the man’s chest and was about to carry on investigating the ship when he felt something begin to change and shift. The air pressure began to build around him until it quickly became unbearable. It was as though the entire ship vibrated too fast to see. His head felt like it would crack like an egg. Bub fell to his knees, clutching his skull. Suddenly there was a bright blue flash making Bub flinch and close his eyes. When he opened them a split second later the man who had been trapped had disappeared as if he had never been there. Bub felt himself become weightless, disembodied but at the same time thrown about as if riding a cart over loose cobbles.

  Then, as suddenly as it had started, the sensation stopped and Bub felt the floor forming beneath his feet. Nausea washed over him and he doubled over, sure for a moment that he was going to be sick. But he held it in. A dull headache began to form and then intensify. Fresh air. He needed some air. He staggered back the way he had come, noting as he moved away that there was no hole in the wall of the ship to suggest that the man he had found had ever been trapped. The gibbering fool had disappeared completely. Bub staggered down the corridor, sliding one shoulder along the wall for support. The severed legs and waist were still there. The corridor span as he slid along it. He hauled himself up the stairs to burst out into the fresh air. The world span and he slumped to one knee.

  The world seemed too bright and his head hurt too much. His head. There was something wrong with his head, it felt as though something had been stuck in his brain and left lodged there. An invisible fork in his head which he couldn’t dislodge. It was maddening. He bent over again and retched. He felt a steadying hand under his armpit and tried to look up. Had that idiot Beeson followed him? He looked over to where the SS Andrew Furuseth had been but it wasn’t there. Where had it gone? He looked up into the face above him, but it was too bright to see.

  'It's okay,' came an unfamiliar voice. 'It's okay, you're back.'

  'Back?' he managed to cough out as the world swayed again.

  'Sure. Back in Philadelphia. The experiment, it went wrong.'

  Philadelphia? How was that possible? A moment ago he had been in Virginia. That must be two hundred miles away.

  'Who are you?' came the voice.

  Bub put his hand up, trying to stand and felt the man take his wrist. As his fist was squeezed Bub realised he was gripping something. He loosened his fingers and the other man took the thing from his hand. It was the name badge from the man who had been fused to the bulkhead in the corridor downstairs.

  'Allende,’ the man read. ‘Well, good to have you back Allende. Come sit in
the chair. You’ll soon feel better. Don’t worry. We’ll look after you.’

  The pain in Bub’s head built and built again until he was sure that he would go mad.

  CHAPTER two

  Somewhere in Mu

  The future: date unknown

  The sight before him was just one more thing to add to the long list which had convinced Sam Hain that the Riven needed to be stopped. Sam stared miserably at the ruins of a small village. The place was deserted. Not even a single bird perched atop the wreckage. The aura of the twisted presence which had caused this was too fresh. It leeched from the remains of the village like a bad smell. The timbers still smoked and the odd flame flickered here and there. This was not the first time that Sam had seen such destruction caused by the Riven. The smouldering ruins reminded him of his own home where he had lived his whole life with his grandfather, Adam Hain, before the Riven had come to kill Sam, attracted by his own potential for presence, setting into motion a chain of events which now found him lost and alone in the distant future in a land known as Mu.

  Here, far from the normality of Sam’s old life Allende, the Riven King, ruled with an iron fist. He was capable of incredible telekinetic power and possessed a cruelty which was surely born out of madness. As well as sending out his black-cloaked Riven followers to track down and either recruit or kill those with presence he also sent them to collect taxes from the down-trodden and impoverished people of Mu. Sometimes, if the taxes were not sufficient to please the Riven, the village was made an example of. Sometimes they just killed anyway.

  Sam studied the sky for a moment. It would be getting dark soon. He would have to shelter here. The lingering evil presence made him shudder but he would not find anywhere else before nightfall and the grassy plains of Mu were not a good place to be after dark. The danger was ever present but once the sun had set strange beasts stalked the land.

  At the edge of the village he found a large barn which, standing apart from the other buildings, had not been touched by the flames. Inside he found it had a high loft which looked like a sort of balcony at one end, accessible via a tall sturdy ladder. Praising his luck he climbed up to find a good quantity of hay. He pulled the ladder up after him, tucked himself down in the hay and settled down to wait for the dawn.

  The barn, already dim, darkened further as night fell and the sun’s light, which had sent golden, pink and then red lines across the floor through the cracks in the wooden planks of the walls, withdrew completely. Sam found one gap in the wood near him which was large enough for him to squint through and get a pretty good view of the world beyond the village. He looked out onto the grassy plains of Mu and distant mountains. Sam watched colour withdraw from the land.

  Sam wanted desperately to sleep but he hadn’t been able to switch off his brain since he had left Kya and Weewalk. He couldn’t be sure exactly how long ago that had been. It might have been three weeks ago. It might have been more. But those weeks had felt like the longest of his life. Sleep, whenever it did come, had been fitful and full of nightmares. He reckoned he never slept for more than an hour or two before waking in a cold sweat.

  In some ways he supposed it was to be expected. After all he had very recently had to deal with some terrible information. The knowledge that he was capable of using a telekinetic force called presence was difficult enough to wrap his head around but he had then taken a long journey to save a man called Tarak, who had turned out to be Kya’s father and a man whom Sam now considered to be an enemy, or at least not an ally. He was dangerous. Along the way Sam had watched his parents die after he had taken a line, one of the weird doorways which crossed time and space, to a night in the past when Sam was a baby. He had seen a powerful member of the Riven, Ferus, try to kill him in the apparently mistaken belief that Sam was in some way special. Ferus had tried to kill Sam because of a lie which Tarak had publicised about Sam’s potential and Sam’s parents had been killed in the process. All because Tarak had gambled that Ferus would destroy himself by attacking Sam. Sam had been a pawn in a game he hadn’t even known he was playing and even now did not fully understand. And in the madness that had ensued Sam had learned the most terrible truth of all. The world that he knew, that he had grown up in, was doomed to be torn apart. It was like Sam had seen the evidence of the end of the era of the dinosaurs but this time he was T-Rex. Mu, the world in which he now shivered in a barn would, in some unknowable number of years, be the product. And this world was horrible. The Riven King had ensured that. Sam had heard whispers of other lands, across strange seas. Perhaps these other places would be different. Perhaps they were not under the terrible rule of the mad King. But nobody seemed to know much, it was all rumour. Perhaps, if he kept moving, Sam would eventually find out.

  It was a lot to deal with. And with the trauma of it all Sam seemed to be losing his presence, the one thing which kept him safe in this cursed world. It came in fits and starts. Sometimes it worked fine and Sam felt strong and powerful, but more often than not he felt weak and fuzzy, like his head was full of cotton wool. He went for long periods where he couldn’t think clearly and he hadn’t been able to find his way to a line of any sort, let alone one back to his own world. He hoped it was just a symptom of him not having enough sleep. He was also not getting enough food or water. It was no wonder he was not feeling well. He had become even skinnier and his untidy brown hair was even messier.

  After perhaps an hour of tossing and turning in the hay Sam sat up again and put his eye to the thin crack between the boards. It was dark now. The night was cloudless and the moon, somewhere out of sight, gave the long grass that covered the rolling hills a silvery shimmery quality. The plains were featureless, unbroken as far as his eye could see. Then, suddenly, movement caught his attention in the far distance. Great humped shapes which he hadn’t seen at first emerged from a small fold in the landscape, moving on top of a low rise. They were quite some way away and Sam could see little detail through the narrow crack. Half a dozen shapes lumbered slowly into view, following each other in a line like a family of elephants might. Sam held his breath even though, whatever they were, were far away and had no chance of realising he was there. The last in the line, the smallest, seemed to stop and stretch a long neck and small head towards the sky for a moment, before moving on again. There was a sudden puff of flame and in the strobe of light Sam saw then that the beasts were followed by other much smaller shapes scurrying around their feet. Within a few moments the strange group had shifted out of sight and Sam let out the breath he was holding. No doubt about it, Mu was not a place to spend the night outdoors.

  With the appearance of the lines such strangeness had occasionally been able to find its way back into what Sam thought of as the real world, his own world, although in truth the worlds were one and the same place, merely separated by unknowable years. Sam had learned that countless unexplained phenomena, strange beasts and paranormal events were simply a product of these other-worldly visitors finding their way back in time. In his rucksack he still kept his grandfather’s journal which detailed many of them. Sam’s world was full of mystery, myth, legend and conspiracy theory. Now he knew that many of these stories had an element of truth. Sam lay down again and eventually managed to fall asleep.

  He woke suddenly. It took a moment to remember where he was. The barn seemed darker than before. Perhaps the moon had set whilst he had slept, yet still a little light filtered in. He lay still for a moment, letting whatever had been hammering in his head during sleep ebb away. It was as though the inside of his brain had been shouting at itself and the echoes still sounded, although indistinct and unintelligible. Then, there came a noise from below the loft.

  Sam froze, his whole body tensing. His breath suddenly held in his nose. Very carefully and slowly he moved to the edge of the balcony, very grateful that he had had the foresight to pull the ladder up with him. He slowly and silently moved to where he could look down into the barn. There, with its eyes fixed on him, sat a garoul, one of the de
adly man-wolf like beasts which had entered Sam’s world as the legend of the werewolf. It was staring directly at him, sitting to attention. Its eyes reflected a little of the light. It didn’t move, or make a sound; it just stared right at Sam.

  Sam slid quickly back into the loft, away from the edge. He had fought the garoul before. But never alone and never when he couldn’t rely on being able to use his power of presence. How high could they jump? Was it about to land up here with him?

  He would have to try presence to see if he could scare it off. He took a deep breath and moved quickly back to the edge, ready to blast it. But the ground below was empty. There was nothing there. Sam looked about, checking and double-checking the darker corners of the barn. He was alone. He shook his head and rubbed at his eyes, stifling a small sob. Had it even been there? He was so tired. He couldn’t tell when he was awake or asleep. Maybe it was just paranoia. He looked again, cautiously. There was no sign that anything had been there.

  Sam slept no further that night. When the first blush of day began to light the cracks in the barn Sam cautiously and quietly replaced the ladder and climbed down. He crept from the barn like a hunting cat but there was no sign of trouble. He slunk past a set of freshly dug graves he had not noticed the night before, the bodies of those who had displeased the visiting Riven. Getting his bearings he set off once again across the plains.