Dark Detectives

by Stephen Jones

  You think? he said.

  I know, I told him, looking at the head.

  Where did he come from? asked Roth.

  I pulled my clothes on, tired from the change.

  Meat and chemicals, I whispered.

  He knew I lied, but wolves are born to lie.

  I sat down on the beach to watch the bay,

  stared at the sky as dawn turned into day.

  And dreamed about the day I too should die.

  Geneviève Dieudonné

  SEVEN STARS EPISODE SEVEN

  THE DUEL OF SEVEN STARS

  by KIM NEWMAN

  French-born Geneviève Dieudonné was the daughter of a physician during the Hundred Years War. Turned by the Dark Kiss of Gilles Chandagnac, she is now a vampire of a different breed.

  The first version of the character, Genevieve Sandrine du Pointe du Lac Dieudonné, appeared in Kim Newman’s Warhammer books Drachenfels (1989), Beasts in Velvet (1991), Genevieve Undead (1993), Silver Nails (2002) and the omnibus The Vampire Genevieve (2005).

  The second—and most realised—is Geneviève Sandrine d’Isle Dieudonné. She is a major character in Anno Dracula (1992), Dracula Cha Cha Cha (1999) and Johnny Alucard (2013).

  The Geneviève who appears in ‘Seven Stars’ is Genèvieve Sandrine Ysolde Dieudonné. She is also featured in the stories ‘The Big Fish’ (Interzone #76, 1993 and Shadows Over Innsmouth, 1994), ‘Cold Snap’ (The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, 2007) and ‘Sorcerer Conjuror Wizard Witch’ (Mysteries of the Diogenes Club, 2010).

  If anyone is paying attention, they all have different middle names. There’s also another one in ‘In the Air’, a story in Eugene Byrne and Newman’s Back in the USSA (1997).

  As the author readily admits, he is playing the old Michael Moorcock multiverse game of examining the alternate lives of all his characters in vastly or subtly different worlds. The multi-part ‘Seven Stars’ is an attempt to thread as much of it together as possible, as is his multiple choice novel, Life’s Lottery (1998).

  THE SHOCK OF death. Is it greater for her, after so long? Despite what the records say, she didn’t quite die in her sixteenth year. She just stopped being human. The young man holds her. She wants his blood.

  The noise in her skull cuts off. A red fringe flops over her eyes. The pain ends.

  Nothing.

  *

  A frozen moment. In a museum. Looking at a man looking at a mummy. His face reflected in the glass of the display case. Hers not. But he senses her, turns. Thinks about her. For a moment.

  In another life …

  *

  Geneviève Sandrine Ysolde Dieudonné. Geneviève the Undying, daughter of the physician Benoit Dieudonné, daughter-in-darkness of Chandagnac, of the bloodline of Melissa d’Acques.

  For her, it is over.

  She is in darkness, unfeeling. She might be in woman-shape. Or something immobile, a sarsen stone, a tree. She sees nothing, but she senses.

  There are others. Not waiting for her, but accepting her, recognising her.

  Five others.

  She knows they were once living too. And in that moment of knowing, she accepts her final death. The five are now six. They reach for her, not physically. She knows them, but their names do not come to mind.

  Neither does her own.

  Together, the six shine. At last, she knows perfect love.

  Not yet complete, though. The Six must become Seven. Lucky Number Seven.

  Then …

  *

  Red light.

  Consciousness resumes, continues. She can think, remember, picture herself, imagine a world beyond. She has a sense of her body. There is still pain, and warmth.

  She is not dead. Not any more. She is alone. Her five companions are gone. Bereft, her heart aches. A tear gathers in her eye.

  *

  Blood trickles into her mouth. Young blood, rich, peppery. It flows through her, bringing a jolt of wakefulness. Her teeth sharpen against her tongue. More blood is spilled onto her lips. She licks, red thirst alive, and feels strength growing.

  Her night-senses come alive. She is acutely aware of the roughness of the cotton shift she is wearing, and of the scents that cling to it.

  Hospital smells sting her.

  She cannot sit. Her head is fixed in place by a contraption of steel clamps and plastic tubes. She swivels her eyes, and sees fluid flowing through the tubes, into her.

  There is an alien object inside. Where the last pain was, she senses an inorganic plate, patching over the ruin of her burst skull.

  She tries to raise a hand to her head. She is restrained, by a durable plastic cuff. She tries harder, and the plastic snaps.

  Someone takes her hand.

  “Getting your strength back, I see.”

  Alarms sound.

  *

  “You’re in the Pyramid,” the young man tells her. He is not a doctor. His face is familiar. “In London Docklands, what’s left of it. The Derek Leech International Building. Some of the staff call it the Last Redoubt.”

  The young man is Jerome, Sally Rhodes’s son.

  He was there when she died.

  Judging by the changes in his face, that must have been years ago.

  “How long …?”

  “Seven months.”

  She sits up in bed.

  “You’ve missed a ton,” he says. “The Plagues. The Wars. The Collapse.”

  She holds her head.

  Her hair is close-cropped, for the first time in centuries.

  “I think it’s snazz,” Jerome says. “You look like Joan of Arc.”

  “Good God, I hope not.”

  She remembers Jeanne d’Arc. It was during her war that Geneviève received the Dark Kiss, became a vampire. There was blood all around. She feels the back of her skull, fingertips pressing the skin over the plate.

  “I don’t understand what Leech’s doctors did,” Jerome says. “I’ve still not really scanned the info that there are such things as vampires.”

  “Sorry,” she shrugs.

  “Not your fault. Any rate, you’re back from the dead. Leech says it’s magic and medicine. You weren’t properly alive, so it was easier to bring you back than it’d have been if you were … um?”

  “A real live girl?”

  “Yes, well, exactly. You were put back together months ago, but the hardest part was what Leech calls ‘summoning you up’. Getting you to move back in, as it were. He’s had a team of spooks—mediums, mages, nutters—working on it. In the end, I think he did it himself, reached out into the wherever and dragged you back. All this is new ground to me.”

  “Me too,” she admits, again fingering her skull, gliding fingertips over her fur.

  “Do you want a mirror? The scars on your head are healing. And you have none on your face.”

  “A mirror would be no good to me. They don’t take.”

  Jerome goggles. She catches a little of his amazement, and sees herself through his eyes, alarmingly tiny in a big bed, face small and pretty on an egg of a head.

  “I gave blood,” he confesses, shyly.

  “I know,” she replies, taking his hand.

  *

  Things have changed while she was away. The boiling point of water is now 78°. That was the effect popularly known as the Plague of Fire. Around the world, spontaneous combustion is a general hazard, and this past summer has seen the uncontrolled burning of much surviving forested land and not a few townships and cities.

  Monsters have come out of the sea, just as in the films of the 1950s, and devastated conurbations. That was the Plague of Dragons, though most called it the Plague of Godzillas. There are other natural catastrophes: insects have predictably run rampant again. Of course, with the interconnectedness of everything, it is hard to distinguish a genuine plague from a side-effect like war, famine, mass psychosis and post-millennial panic.

  The Plague of Babel ended electronic communications. It did not shut down the Information World, as the C
ollapse Theorists prophesied, but habitually scrambles three out of every four transactions, providing convincing but fabricated images as well as texts and sound effects. Many of the scrambles are just garbage, but some are malicious. Economic and military wars have been triggered by caprice.

  An Empire is falling. And the Emperor has busied himself not with shoring up the barricades but with engineering her resurrection.

  She wonders why Derek Leech cares so much about her.

  *

  “You are familiar with the suppressed quatrains of Nostradamus?”

  “Of course.”

  “In 1942, one of them led you to the Seven Stars.”

  “I didn’t see it. The gumshoe did.”

  “Michel was sadly given to obscurity.”

  “I often wondered why he never predicted anything happy. Or world-changing in a trivial sense. Elvis’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The discovery of penicillin.”

  Leech does not smile.

  He is seeing her in his office at the apex of the Pyramid. Through the tinted screen-windows, the fires ravaging the city are crimson carpet patches. Black gargantuoids, lizard-tails whipping, sumo-wrestle in the burning ruins.

  Banks of screens are grey and dead. This is the central node of a global net of information-flow, the heart of an electronic Yggdrasil that has bound together humanity and subjugated them to a man-shaped creature. It is just a room full of obsolete junk.

  A few—Jerome’s mother, for one—had protested that Leech’s increasing dominion of the world reduced people to components in a global device, locked into cell-like monads, consuming garbage info, indentured spectators and consumers.

  Under Derek Leech, history became soap.

  When Edwin Winthrop allowed the Jewel of Seven Stars to be focused against the Axis Powers and their Ancient Masters, he smashed Empires but dipped his hands in blood. The trust handed down to him was subtly betrayed, a chink was opened in the world, and through that chink had squeezed Derek Leech.

  Now, the Seven Stars rain plagues on Leech.

  She should be happier.

  The plagues come too late, when Leech’s Pyramid is at the top of the world. They flow down the black glass sides of this building and spread out to the corners of the map.

  This is the end, she thinks.

  Leech takes a book from his desk. It is the only book she has seen in the Pyramid. Though access to electronic information is compromised, there is not a general falling-back to print or scribbled memos. Paper, its combustion point lowered from Bradbury’s 451, is a hazard.

  “During the late War, you were allowed access to only the quatrains relevant to the short term. Edwin Winthrop kept a lot from you, but a lot was kept from him. His ultimate part in all this, for instance. And yours.”

  He has her attention.

  At a touch, he untints the glass. The fires leap up in vividity. Even the eyes of the battling beasts now burn like unhealthy neons.

  In the sky, the moon is blood-red. And Ursa Major is missing.

  “This is wrong,” Leech says. “Whatever you think of the world you left, this is not an acceptable alternative.”

  She has to agree.

  “The old world, things as they were before, can be bought back.”

  “Brought back?”

  “No, bought. Everything is economics. Things can be as they were, according to Nostradamus, with seven lives twice-lost. Seven dead will return to the Earth, and die again. You are the first, and through you the other six will be gathered. There is a death beyond death.”

  “I don’t fear it.”

  Everyone asks her what it was like. She hasn’t able to explain.

  “I envy you, Geneviève. You know things I will never access. I must content myself with everything else.”

  “So, when it’s over, you’ll rule in Hell?”

  “That, sadly, Nostradamus is silent on.”

  “Ain’t it just the way?”

  “Indeed.”

  *

  In the heart of the Pyramid, she is ushered into an orrery, one of Leech’s famous magical devices. A globe of interlocking brass and copper and steel partial spheres, gimballed like a giant gyroscope, it is a schematic of the solar system. It is an impressive bit of clockwork, but here is just a focus.

  Leech has offered to dress the process up with ritual and chanting. Blood sacrifices, if necessary. But it is down to her to reach out, to travel back to the sphere from which he summoned her, to reach her companions. If they are brought to this world, they will be the Seven, who alone—according to Mad Michel—can check the unleashed plagues of the Seven Stars.

  She has not told Leech that there are, by her reckoning, only Six Samurai. After all, de NostreDame—whom she now regrets not visiting personally when she was a vigorous 150 and giving his throat a good wringing—is often only ball-park accurate.

  One thing in the cards is that she alone will survive the coming Duel of the Seven Stars. She has already died twice—her change from human to vampire counts—and so she alone of the Merry Band has already paid her due and will live on, to see what Leech makes of the world and, unless she misses her guess, to do her best to see it isn’t as dire as it might be.

  The Seventh of her Circle bothers her. Does his or her absence invalidate the whole quatrain?

  Damn all cloudy prophets and smug seers. Cassandra didn’t get half the kicking she deserved.

  She becomes the Sun, taking her seat in the centre of the orrery.

  “I shall try to shine,” she announces.

  *

  Leech isn’t here, though she knows he must be watching over her from somewhere. He is a creature of the eaves, peering out of the darkness, a cosmic couch potato. Technicians of enchantment, plastic young women she thinks of as attendant demons, work the levers. And Jerome, another loose component in this clanking magical machine. If this is for anyone, it is for him. In honour of his mother.

  She shuts herself down.

  The orrery revolves.

  *

  Her five companions expect her. They have been incomplete. She is the pathway. Through her, they channel themselves. She senses more. Scraps of lives lost. Some familiar to her, some strange. As one, they dwindle into reality.

  *

  The orrery concludes its cycle.

  She pulls herself out of the contraption, brain a-swarm with trace memories. The phenomenon is more acute than the mostly random mind-link she has with those living whose blood she has taken. It’s like sharing skull-space with strangers.

  “She’s alone,” a woman says. “It’s over. We’ve failed.”

  “No,” says Jerome. “Not yet.”

  Jerome helps her stand. He looks into her eyes.

  Now, at last, the Circle is complete.

  The red thirst comes upon her like a raging wave. Her fang teeth sprout like bone-knives. The strangers in her skull add to her need.

  “Leech said a blood sacrifice would complete the forging of the Circle,” Jerome whispers, popping his collar-seam. “Take me.”

  Her predator’s lizard-like brainstem overrides all civilised restraint. In this state, she has no conscience, no personality, no qualms. She has only red thirst. She is a blood junkie, the worst sort of vampire bitch.

  Her mouth fastens on Jerome’s throat in urgent rape. She bites into his jugular vein, tearing through the skin and meat, and sucks in the great gouts of blood.

  She feels his heartbeat under her hand.

  His blood pours into her, along with much else. His mind is sucked entirely into hers, jostling with the other strangers. Chunks of stringy meat-stuff cram into her throat. She swallows and expands.

  This is Geneviève, the Monster.

  She sucks desperately until his heart is still and her body is bloated with blood.

  She can not absorb all she has taken. Her mouth is full, her cheeks swollen.

  This has happened before, three times in 600 years. These are her most shameful secrets, the unwil
ling sacrifices she has taken to ensure her continuance. She tells herself the red thirst is irresistible, like a possessing spirit, but that is a rationalisation. At bottom, she is convinced that she can will herself not to kill. She does not do so, through choice. She lets the lizard-stem take over.

  Whether Jerome is a willing sacrifice or not, she has sinned again. She has lost something of herself. It is too late to give him the Dark Kiss, to bring him back as a vampire. He is dead, drained meat.

  The attendant demons are appalled, and stay back, afraid she will turn on them. The strangers in her skull, blooded, are growing. They speak to her, like the voices that bothered Jeanne d’Arc.

  “Soon, soon, soon,” they whisper.

  Four men, one woman.

  No. Five men, one woman.

  They are Seven. As predicted.

  She is heavy, full to bursting, belly bloated, throat stretched like a snake’s. The taste of blood is ecstasy on her tongue. At her feet lie Jerome’s clothes. He is gone from them. Without his blood and his ghost, the meat has dissolved completely. His whole substance is in her.

  “Now,” they cry, with one voice.

  She opens her mouth, and a cloud of red matter explodes from her, pouring into the air.

  *

  Six shapes resolve in the cloud of bloody ectoplasm. The first is a thin, brown man with an open wound in his chest. He wears a classical garment and Ancient Egyptian court headdress. This, Geneviève knows, is Pai-net’em, who kept the Jewel of Seven Stars to himself for three thousand years.

  Then comes a handsome man all in black. His clothes are Elizabethan in cut, but his sharp moustache is 1920s style. He carries a plaster skull in one hand and a duelling sword in the other.

  “Time is out of joint,” John Barrymore announces. “O curséd spite, that e’er I was born to set it right.”

  Next is Edwin.

  He comes together as he was long before she knew him, in a muddy officer’s uniform, young and haunted, ears ringing from bombardments.

  “I died,” he says. “In the trenches. The rest was just in my mind. No. Geneviève. You were part of it. The world after the War.”

  She takes his hand, feels him calm down.

  “There were shadows like men,” he says.

  Now, a woman joins them. Maureen Mountmain, as full of life as when Geneviève fed off her. She is less bewildered than the others.