“What you need books for, Preacher?” Boo shifted his grasp on The Professor’s arm as he tried to pull away. “Can’t you just pray to God for your answers—you bein’ so righteous and all?”
“Now, boys,” I soothed, “we’re all just doing the best we can to figure out how it all works.”
“And some of us,” Boo added, “are trying to figure out why we’re not already in heaven instead of slumming with the sinners on the slag heap of the dead.”
Jerome turned on his heel and stalked off in a huff. Well, actually, it was more of a shamble-off-in-a-huff kind of thing.
“Hey,” the big corpse called after him, “have you tried hopping? Maybe y’all gotta jump-start that Rapture effect! Beam me up, Jesus!”
“That’s not very nice,” I said.
“Aw, he’s always askin’ for it.” But he did look a little ashamed. “And what am I gonna do? Piss off God? Oooo, He might strike me dead! No, wait . . . He might banish my soul to wander the earth after I die! No wait . . .”
“Alright, you’ve made your point.” I rummaged through the sack and pulled out a packet of oddly shaped dice. One die had eight sides, another ten, and yet another twenty. “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game dice,” I read off the package and handed it to Cam. “You play D & D?” It was a rhetorical question—in practical terms, anything you asked Cam was a rhetorical question.
“E & E,” Boo answered for him.
“What?”
“Ectoplasm & Exorcists,” he elaborated. “Plays with the Gorsky twins over in the northeast plots.”
I just looked at him.
“You know . . . you’re kibitzing at a séance and suddenly a fifteenth-level exorcist bursts into the room and begins reading from the Roman Ritual. What do you do?”
I shrugged. “Make a saving throw?” I reached into the sack and pulled out another book. “Here, Boo; Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.” As I handed it to him, he relaxed his grip on The Professor, who wrenched himself free and ran back into the mists of the cemetery.
“Oops. Guess we’d better go fetch our newbie before he finds a way off the grounds and really stirs up a ruckus!” As he turned to go, he ruffled the pages of his new present. “Hey, no pictures!”
“It’s a war story, Bubba, not necrophilial porn.”
He shrugged, took a step, and then stopped. “Hey, Hoss, I think we got company.”
I turned my head and looked across the cemetery grounds. There were four—no, five—of them, fanning out as they crept among the crypts, using tombstones and monuments for cover. A couple of them were as cold as Boo and Cam but the others flickered like a banked fire—not warm enough to be alive but not cold enough to be completely dead.
Undead, to be more specific. Outtatown Revenants, come to do some wet-work at la Casa de Cséjthe.
No wonder I had bad dreams. A couple of years ago I was as normal as the next guy. That was before an untidy blood transfusion with the Lord of the Undead netted me one-half of that recombinant virus that changes day-trippers into night-sippers. And while it’s true that I’m stronger and faster than the vast majority of humankind, I’m no match for anyone who’s completely crossed over to the other side of the blood divide. One-on-one, I’d last about thirty seconds against a full-fledged vampire if everything else was equal. And if I couldn’t outrun much less outfight one vampire, what were my chances with five of them?
I reached up inside my shirt and unsnapped the leather restraining strap over the trigger. There’s an old saying that “God made all men but Sam Colt made ‘em equal.” Well, even superhuman reflexes and a Glock-20 with silver fragmentation loads didn’t make me the equal of five fanged assassins. Still, I hadn’t used my gun in self-defense yet and I was betting that I wouldn’t be doing so tonight. I left the Glock in the holster for the moment.
It was a safe bet: the house odds were in my favor. The ground began to boil around the intruders’ feet. Two of them lost their footing and fell to the ground. Correction: fell into the ground and disappeared without a trace. Another one fell to his knees. Three cadavers popped up around him, looking like ghastly manikins cut off at the waist. They grabbed the surprised vampire and dragged him down into the unsettled earth. The beginnings of a scream were cut off as dirt clods filled his fanged mouth.
That left two nosferatu on their feet. Dozens of arms were now thrust up out of the ground, moldy hands grasping undead ankles, shins, knees, thighs, a couple grabbing belts. One toppled and disappeared. The other gamely struggled on, ripping an arm loose from a corpse and using it to club at the others.
“How many is this, now?” Boo asked.
“Third attempt this year,” I said, “and we’re barely through January.”
The reason I had survived three attacks was due, in no small measure, to our relocation to the new neighborhood. After our old house was badly damaged during last year’s assault by demonically sponsored paramilitary forces, we found ourselves in the market for something with a little more seclusion and a lot more security. The property boundaries of my new domicile practically screamed the old Realtors’ adage “Location, location, location!”
The front yard ended as a bluff overlooking the Ouachita River. Since most vampires won’t willingly cross running water, the bad guys just figured it was easier to come at me across open ground on the other three sides. Well, “open ground” is a bit of a misnomer: an old cemetery borders my property line where the river doesn’t. And, so far, none of my bloodsucking assassins had made it past the necro-hood watch. Eventually the “people” sending them were going to get wise.
But not tonight. The last vampire disappeared beneath a dog pile of decomposing bodies and sank into the loamy earth.
“Five,” Boo grunted. “They never sent this many before.”
I leaned against the wall. “Kurt wants me to come back to New York. He thinks I could nip this in the bud by facing down the families there that want to challenge me for the throne.”
“Throne? You people have a throne?”
“Figure of speech,” I said. “I hope. And what do you mean ‘you people’? I am not a vampire. Not fully, anyway. Not yet. And Lupé is a werewolf—you don’t want to suggest otherwise while she’s around. And Deirdre—well, we don’t really know what Deirdre is anymore.”
He grinned. “And you’re not the voodoo Loa of the Dead.”
I looked away. I hate it when they grin. “I’ve met Baron Samedi. He’s still miffed that some of his subjects prefer my company to his.”
“Guess we ain’t the boyz in his hood. Ah, I see Cam’s corralled our reluctant zombie.”
I turned and saw The Professor being herded back toward us by Boo’s faceless buddy. “What are you going to do with him?”
“Walk him around until first cock’s crow. The first emergence is always traumatic for the newbies. And you can never tell who’s gonna be hit the hardest—the religious types who expect to wake up in heaven or the atheists who don’t expect to wake up at all.”
He started toward the other two and I turned back toward the house with a troubled heart. The worst part of dealing with the living dead was not the smell or the gruesome reminders of one’s own mortality.
It was the troubling question of why they were still here.
* * *
Back in the house I could hear the clanking of heavy weights down in the basement signifying Deirdre’s presence. Lupé and J.D. were still unaccounted for.
That wasn’t surprising as the trip into town takes a little longer from the new digs. For instance: the garage is on the other side of the river. First, you have to go down to the retaining wall at the edge of the front lawn, duck through the curtain of weeping willows, pass through the gate, go down about three-dozen stairs to the docks below, cast off and take the boat across the Ouachita River to a private landing on the opposite bank. Then you climb about three dozen more stairs to a private garage, disengage two alarm systems, neutralize Mama Samm’s voodoo hexes
, and drive one of the cars into town.
Lather, rinse, repeat for the return trip.
Yes, it’s a hassle and deliveries are a bitch, but the whole crossing running water taboo for vampires combined with a graveyard serving as an anti-undead minefield had raised my life expectancy by another three to four months.
The house was a hundred-and-fifty-year-old, two-story manse with a columned front porch. A carriage house in the back had been converted into guest quarters by the previous occupant. That’s where the security staff was housed and the boys were going to be in a lot of trouble if Deirdre or Lupé found out about the particulars of tonight’s near incursion.
Of course, I would be in even more trouble if they learned that I had stepped outside unescorted so I wasn’t about to tattle. Besides, I knew the hired help was extremely uncomfortable when it came to “The Neighbors”—I was still human enough to empathize a bit on that issue.
Kurt was right. I was going to have to go to New York and settle this somehow. The property boundaries had been very effective so far but eventually they were going to come at me in a different way. Perhaps skydiving nosferatu (nosferti? nosfertae?). If I was going to make any changes to the demesne system during my predictably brief tenure as Doman, I should probably start with their politics.
New York embraced the Klingon model of political advancement through assassination. Even if I hadn’t been the primary target for lethal political ambitions, it would have vexed me. Powerful, ancient, bloodsucking creatures of the night should have a better means of governance than a science fiction trope.
* * *
Back in my study a fire crackled merrily in the small Victorian-style fireplace as I popped the magazine on the Glock and locked both in my desk drawer. I was getting better about not setting foot outside without being armed but I’d be damned if I was going to eat, sleep, and visit the john while carrying. If the day (or night) came that any hostile vampires actually made it as far as the house, they still had to be invited in. In that respect, at least, a man’s home remained his castle.
I wandered around the room, considering the hundreds of shelved book spines that turned two of the four walls into colorful crazy quilts done in literary motif. I fingered a brand-new translation of The Egyptian Book of the Dead next to a cracked and crumbling edition of The Peruvian Book of the Dead. On the other side was a paperback copy of the Jerry Garcia book of The Dead.
I was still working the glitches out of my home-grown cataloging system.
The library was divided into two separate sections, the medical and the metaphysical. A 300-gallon marine aquarium served as a de facto divider, its cold-blooded inhabitants gliding back and forth, occasionally stopping to contemplate the incomprehensible world that unfolded just beyond their own saltwater existence. I stopped to sprinkle some freeze-dried brine shrimp over the bubbling surface and their questions were forgotten in a roiled feeding frenzy. The scorpion fish, a Pterois volitans, was circling the melee, venomous spines a-quiver, as if considering the feeders as potential feedees so I dropped a couple of prawns in to keep the mayhem down to an acceptable level.
The resultant chaos in the aquarium was reflective of my approach to sorting the half of my library dealing with the subjects of death and the hereafter. It remained a work in progress as I vacillated between catagorizing by author, religion, or general theory. Shelving genetics, viral science, and blood-borne pathogens is child’s play by comparison.
The biggest problem is that most of everything believed or written about the afterlife or heaven or hell is based on hearsay or wishful thinking and very little in the way of eye-witness accounts. While there are those supposed “life after life” testimonials, who’s to say it’s not just a dream or hallucination—the by-product of a brain starved for oxygen during that abbreviated time-out called “clinical death"? I’d prefer to hear from somebody who took the extended tour, not just the poke-your-head-in-and-glance-around-then-hurry-back-home-to-the-ICU anecdote.
Returning to Little Gidding, Eliot wrote: “ . . . the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” But in my experience, if the long-dead dream of heaven, they don’t seem to remember anything if they come back. Ditto for vampires. In fact, just thinking about the whole concept seems to wig them out. They say there are no atheists in foxholes but reopened graves are an entirely different matter. The Bible doesn’t record Lazarus’ thoughts on his three days in the tomb experience. But legend holds that, during those long years in which he was granted a second sojourn among the living, the brother of Mary and Martha never smiled again.
So a note to all televangelists: resurrection may not be all that it’s cracked up to be.
Still, you have to believe in something, I thought as I looked up at the great sword that hung above the fireplace mantel. I do, anyway. I’d rather believe in something and, in the end, discover there was nothing—than believe in nothing and, when the end comes, discover that there was Something, after all. You may not agree but we all have some kind of judgment day, some day, and some time, some where.
I’d already had a couple, myself.
I walked over and pulled the enormous blade from its twisted oaken sheath. The blue-green metal refracted the room’s track lighting in coruscating rainbows. So far I’d resisted the temptation to send the magnificent blade off for serious testing. The metal might be some unknown meteorite alloy: it was stronger and harder but lighter than steel. I had seen the edge slice through fossilized dinosaur bones like they were so much papier-mâché. Under a magnifying glass, however, the edge remained impossibly sharp, showing neither nick nor notch.
What could a lab tell me, anyway? That the test results were anomalous?
And what could I tell them when they came back with questions of their own? That it had been left behind by an angel—possibly an archangel?
For now, it continued to hang over the fireplace like a mildly curving question mark, another mismatched piece for the jigsaw puzzle of Faith.
I wondered if “Brother” Michael was ever coming back for his sword.
Maybe all of that was a dream, too; the by-product of a once human brain being slowly turned inside-out by the necrotic virus I’d inherited from Vlad Drakul Bassarab.
As if to punctuate that thought, my computer chimed and a digitized voice announced: “You’ve got mail! Let’s count de messages! Vun! Two! Tree messages! Ah! Ah! Ah!”
Deirdre, in one of her many fits of boredom, had upgraded my messaging system with .wav files of “The Count” from Sesame Street. Having a heavily-accented Muppet announce the arrival of email was kind of cute—the first couple of days. Forget haunted houses and graveyards; the scariest things inhabit the Internet.
I replaced the sword in its gnarled, wooden sheath and sat down to check my computer’s inbox. Too bad she hadn’t upgraded my spam filter. The first two messages turned out to be pleas from surviving relatives of assassinated African cabinet ministers who wished the temporary use of my bank account in order to launder millions of dollars from private government accounts. At least the virus hadn’t sufficiently emulsified my brain for me to fall for scams like this. Sadly, there were people without hemophagic viruses ravaging their cerebral cortexes, who would.
The third message in my inbox was more problematical. As I scrolled down the virtual page, a pattern of Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared.
Familiar-looking hieroglyphs.
Followed by an even more familiar translation:
Oh! Amon Ra, Oh . . .
God of gods . . .
Death is but the doorway to new life.
We live today. We shall live again . . .
In many forms shall we return . . .
O mighty one . . .
The screen flickered.
It more than flickered; it ran through all 1,024 variations of the monitor’s color settings in about twenty seconds.
I blinked and looked up from the monitor. And saw a stranger sitting
across the room.
Except it wasn’t my room.
A moment before I was sitting in my crowded little study. Now the room was cavernous. Panels of dark, gleaming wood replaced the bookshelves. The fireplace had grown into a giant, stonework affair that suggested the fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego: you could walk around inside without bumping your head.
An elderly man sat upon an antique chaise lounge across from me. His legs were elevated and hidden beneath a colorful stratum of quilts and comforters. He wore a maroon velvet smoking jacket with white edelweiss embroidered upon the lapels and a blue cravat or scarf that all but obscured his shirt. His white hair was sparse and his moustache wispy enough to be almost invisible. His head was round and vaguely he put me in mind of a Peanuts cartoon character—Charlie Brown some sixty years hence and waiting for a visit from his grandchildren. Snoopy’s master grown sharp and crafty with age. . . .
“Mr. Cséjthe,” the stranger began. I would have thought his speech without accent was it not for his pronunciation of the hard consonants in my name. “ . . . please forgive this unorthodox intrusion but I simply must speak with you. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr. Pipt.”
“What’s up, Doc?” I growled, though I suspected that this was going to be a one-way conversation.
“As you may have already surmised, I am not actually here,” the apparition explained.
As if to underscore the point a clown fish from my aquarium wriggled up to the old man as if in search of a handout. Finding none, it turned and disappeared.
“I have embedded this message in the code strings and algorithms of the computer message so that I might have a better chance of making my case,” Pipt elaborated.
In other words, a pop-up mpeg that played inside your head. This was damned impressive!
He brought a slender hand from beneath the coverlets and smoothed a stray wisp of hair behind his ear. “I am a scientist who has spent his whole life unlocking the secrets of the human condition. I pioneered genetics research years before the discovery of the double helix ignited scientific curiosity in the rest of the world. I have devoted my entire life to one, great and overriding goal!”
Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III Page 2
