He went upstairs. The bedrooms were empty, too. He touched the shadowy mark on the wall where a portrait of Mina had hung. Then he threw back his head and let out a roar of rage that made the windows shake in their sashes, and started the neighborhood’s dogs barking.
Shortly after eleven o’clock, he found a girl standing in a bus shelter, smoking a cigarette and chewing gum at the same time. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen or seventeen, and she still had that post-pubescent plumpness that he particularly relished. She had long blonde hair and she was wearing a black leather jacket and a short red dress.
He crossed the street. It was raining—a fine, prickling rain—and the road-surface reflected the streetlights and the shop-windows like the water in a dark harbor. He approached the girl directly and stood looking at her, his hand drawn up to his overcoat collar.
“You’ll remember me the next time you see me, won’t you, mate?” she challenged him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You remind me so much of somebody I used to know.”
“Oh, that’s original. Next thing you’ll be asking me if I come here often.”
“I’m—I’m looking for some company, that’s all,” he told her. Even after all these years, he still found it went against the grain to approach women so bluntly.
“I don’t know, mate. I’ve got to be home by twelve or my mum’ll go spare.”
“A quick drink, maybe?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to miss my bus.”
“I have plenty of money. We could have a good time.” Inside, his sensibilities winced at what he was having to say.
The girl looked him up and down, still smoking, still chewing. “You look like a big strong bloke,” she suggested. “We could always do it here. So long as you’ve got a johnny.”
He looked around. The street was deserted, although an occasional car came past, its tires sizzling on the wet tarmac. “Well . . .” he said, uncertainly. “I was thinking of somewhere a little less public.”
“It’s up to you,” she said. “My bus’ll be here in five minutes.”
He was just about to refuse her offer and turn away when she flicked her hair with her hand, revealing the left side of her neck. It was radiantly white, so white that he could see the blueness of her veins. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“All right,” he said, tightly. “We’ll do it here.”
“Twenty quid,” she demanded, holding out her hand.
He opened his thin black wallet and gave her two ten-pound notes. She took a last drag on her cigarette, flicked it into the street, and then she hoisted up her dress to her waist and tugged down her white Marks & Spencer pants. Somewhere in his mind he briefly glimpsed Lucy’s voluminous petticoats, the finest white cotton trimmed with Nottingham lace, and the way in which she had so demurely clasped her thighs tightly together.
He kissed the girl on the forehead, breathing in the smell of cigarette-smoke and shampoo. He kissed her eyelids and her cheeks. Then he tried to kiss her lips but she slapped him away. “What are you trying to do? Pinch my gum? I thought we were supposed to be having it off, not kissing.”
He grasped her shoulders and stared directly into her eyes. He could tell by the expression on her face that she had suddenly begun to realize that this wasn’t going to be one of her usual encounters, twenty pounds for a quick one. “What?” she asked him. “What is it?”
“One kiss,” he said. “Then no more. I promise.”
“I don’t like kissing. It gives you germs.”
“This kiss you will enjoy more than any other kiss you have ever had.”
“No, I don’t want to.” She reached down and tried to tug her panties back up.
“You’re going to go back on our bargain?” he asked her.
“I told you. I don’t like kissing. Not men like you. I only kiss blokes I’m in love with.”
“Yet you don’t mind having sex with me, here, in the street, somebody you don’t even know?”
“That’s different.”
He let go of her, and lowered his arms. “Yes,” he said, rather ruefully. “That’s different. But there was a time when it was the greatest prize that a man could ever win from a woman.”
She laughed, a silly little Minnie Mouse laugh. That was when he gripped her hair and hit her head against the back of the bus shelter, as hard as he could. The glass frame holding the timetable smashed, and the timetable itself was splattered in blood.
As she sagged, he held her up to prevent her from dropping to the ground. Then he looked around again to make sure that the street was still empty. He hoisted her up, and carried her around the bus shelter and into the bushes behind it. He found himself half-climbing, half-sliding down a steep slope strewn with discarded newspapers, empty lager cans and plastic milk-crates. The girl lolled in his arms, her head hanging back, her eyes closed, but he could tell by the bubbles of froth that were coming from her mouth that she wasn’t dead.
He took her down into a damp, dark gully, smelling of leaf-mould. He laid her down, and with shaking hands he unzipped her jacket and wrestled it off her. Then he tore open her dress, exposing her left breast. He knelt astride her, lowered his head, and with an audible crunch he sank his teeth into her neck, severing her carotid artery.
The first spurt went right over his shoulder, spattering his coat. The second hit his cheek and soaked his collar. But he opened his mouth wide, and he caught the next spurt directly on his tongue, and swallowed, and went on swallowing, with a choking, cackling sound, while the girl’s heart obligingly pumped her blood directly down his throat.
Whether he was driven by rage for his lost possessions, or by disgust for the world in which he now found himself, or by sheer greed, he went on an orgy of blood-feeding that night. He slid into a suburban bedroom and drank a young wife dry while her husband slept beside her. He found a young homeless boy under a railway arch and left him white-faced and lifeless in his cardboard bash, staring up at the sodium-tainted sky. He hated the color of that sky, and he longed for the days when nights had been black instead of orange.
By the end of the night, he had left nine people dead. He was so gorged with blood that his stomach was swollen, and he had to stop in the doorway of Boots the Chemists and vomit some of it up, adding to the splatter of regurgitated curry that was already there. He returned to his empty house. He would have liked to have stayed up longer, walking around the rooms, but the sun was already edging its way over the garden fence, and the frost was glittering like caster sugar. He raised the cellar trap and disappeared below.
He slept, and he dreamed . . .
He dreamed of battles, and the screaming of mutilated men. He dreamed of mountains, and forests as dark as nightmares. He thought he was back in his castle, but his castle was collapsing all around him. Chunks of stone fell from the battlements. Towers collapsed. Whole curtain-walls came roaring down, like landslides.
The earth shook, but he was so bloated with blood that he barely stirred. He whispered only one word, “Lucy . . .”
It took the best part of the day to demolish the house. The wrecking ball swung and clumped and reduced the walls to rubble and toppled the tall Edwardian chimneys. By four o’clock the demolition crew were working by floodlight. A bulldozer ripped up the overgrown garden and roughly leveled the hardcore, and then a road-roller crushed the site completely flat.
During the next week, trucks trundled over the site, tipping tones of sand to form a sub-base, followed by even more tones of hydraulic cement concrete. This was followed by a thick layer of bituminous road pavement, and finally a top-wearing course of hot asphalt.
Deep beneath the ground, he continued to sleep, unaware of his entombment. But he had digested most of his feast, and his sleep was twitchier now, and his eyes started to flicker.
The new link road between Leeds and Roundhay was finished in the middle of January, a week ahead of schedule. In the same week, his property was sold at auction in Dewsbury,
and fetched well over £780,000. A Victorian portrait of a white-faced woman in a white dress was particularly admired, and later featured on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. Among other interesting items was a Chippendale secrétaire. The new owner was an antiques dealer called Abrahams. When he looked through the drawers, he found scores of unopened letters, some from France, many from Romania and Poland, and some local. Some were dated as far back as 1926. Among the more recent correspondence were seven letters from the county council warning the occupier of a compulsory purchase order, so that a new road could be built to ease traffic congestion and eliminate an accident black spot.
He lay in his casket, wide awake now and ragingly hungry—unable to move, unable to rise, unable to die. He had screamed, but there was no point at all in screaming. All he could do was to wait in claustrophobic darkness for the traffic and the weather and the passing centuries to wear the road away.
TERRY LAMSLEY was born in the south of England but lived in the north for most of his life. He currently resides in Amsterdam, Holland.
His first collection of supernatural stories, Under the Crust, was initially published in a small paperback edition in 1993. Originally intended to only appeal to local readers and the tourist market in Lamsley’s home town of Buxton, Derbyshire, in the heart of England’s Peak District (the volume’s six tales are all set in or around the area), its reputation quickly grew, helped when Under the Crust reached the hands of the late Karl Edward Wagner, editor of The Year’s Best Horror Stories series.
Wagner was instrumental in the book being nominated for three World Fantasy Awards in 1994, and ultimately winning the Best Novella award for the title story of the collection. Ramsey Campbell accepted it on the author’s behalf, and Lamsley’s reputation as a writer of supernatural fiction was assured.
In 1997, Canada’s Ash-Tree Press reissued Under the Crust as a handsome hardcover, limited to just 500 copies and now as sought-after as the long out-of-print first edition. A year earlier, Ash-Tree had published a second collection of Lamsley’s short stories, Conference with the Dead: Tales of Supernatural Terror, and it was followed in 2000 by a third collection, Dark Matters. Night Shade Books reprinted the International Horror Guild Award-winning Conference with the Dead in 2005, with the limited edition containing a previously uncollected story.
Edited by Peter Crowther, Fourbodings: A Quartet of Uneasy Tales from Four Masters of the Macabre showcased the fiction of Lamsley, Simon Clark, Tim Lebbon and Mark Morris, while Made Ready & Cupboard Love is a collection of two original novellas from Subterranean Press, and RIP a novella from PS Publishing.
Volunteers
Terry Lamsley
For a vampire, help can sometimes come from the most unexpected source . . .
I think, for the first visit, you had better take someone with you. He’s probably a nice enough old gentleman, but we don’t know much about him.”
“Is he very old?”
“I believe so.”
“That’s a posh street, where he lives. The best part of town. We don’t often get called out there. The residents are well off enough to buy better help than we provide.”
“Anyone can fall on hard times, Sylvia.”
“I assume he is housebound?”
The Volunteer Coordinator nodded. “He had an accident some time ago that has stopped him getting about. Broke his hip, I believe. Something like that. A neighbor informed us he was probably in trouble.”
“The independent type,” Silvia said. “Too proud to ask for the help he needs. Toffs like that aren’t used to talking about their private problems with the likes of us.”
“They have to get used to it pretty quickly if they want to take advantage of the services we provide, love,” the Coordinator reflected. “He could have to wait months or years for medical treatment. Single, elderly men are not high on anybody’s list of priorities. Meanwhile, we’ll just have to make an assessment of his needs, and do the best we can for him.”
“Poor old soul,” Sylvia said.
The Coordinator smiled compassionately, as she did dozens of times each working day, to express the depth of her empathy with her staff, their clients, and the world in general.
“Take Mr. Strope along, Sylvia. He’s getting bored sitting about in the office with nothing much to do.”
“Isn’t there anyone else? Someone I know?”
“He requested to be put with you. Says he admires you.”
Sylvia pulled a sour face. She had frequently noticed the little man watching her recently. She kept bumping into him in shops, on the street, all over the place. It was almost as though he were stalking her. She was afraid he might have learned some of her secrets.
“There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Strope, is there dear?”
“Well, just the way he looks, I suppose. And the way he looks at me.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s got a hungry look.”
“Are you suggesting he might be a pest? He’s been checked. The police say he’s clean as a whistle.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that.”
The Coordinator rested her fingertips together under her chin and gave Sylvia a challenging look. “He’s new to the job, but he seems to have his head screwed on: he picks things up fast, and he’s keen,” she said. “But you don’t have to take him if you don’t want to, pet.”
“I’ve nothing against him, I suppose,” Sylvia admitted.
The Coordinator handed her a sheet of paper with an address written on it.
“Off you go then, poppet. He’s got an Irish-sounding name, the old chap. O’Cooler, Mr. Strope said he thought it was. He took the call. Said it could have been Doctor O’Cooler, but the line was crackly. Let me know how you both got on as soon as you get back, won’t you?”
Sylvia memorized the number of the house and handed the paper back with a dismissive flourish.
“Of course I will,” she said primly, and left.
“I don’t think anyone in there can hear me knocking because the door’s so thick. It’s like the entrance to a castle.”
They had been on the front step for what seemed a long time.
“Try the bell again,” Sylvia suggested.
Mr. Strope was about to comply when he suddenly froze in an alert, listening posture. He turned to Sylvia with his eyes wide and his mouth open, as though he was going to take a bite out of her.
“Did you hear that? Something’s moving in there.”
Sylvia shook her head skeptically.
Strope listened again. “Getting closer,” he said. He rapped the door hard with the back of his hand. Unmistakably, a voice sounded distantly inside.
“Go away. No tradesmen. No religious bigots.”
Sylvia was used to outright rejection of this kind. She had long ago learned how to chat and charm her way into the most inhospitable, unwelcoming establishments. It was just one of her many skills. Sure enough, after a few well chosen pleas and blandishments, whoever was behind the door grudgingly agreed to let them in.
They waited patiently, watching the door with speculative anticipation, until an open hand appeared abruptly through the large, flapless letterbox. A big, none-too-clean hand with long, strong square-tipped fingers. Palm up, it bore an ancient key.
The message was obvious. Strope accepted the key, the hand withdrew, and they let themselves in.
It was extremely gloomy inside the house. Sylvia, carefully venturing forth, was expecting this, as she had noticed heavy, drawn curtains at every window as she had approached the huge red-brick Victorian building minutes earlier. No lights were on. Darkness hung everywhere like some solid substance.
A person in a wheelchair, backing steadily away from them down the hallway, was receding into invisibility. They had no alternative but to follow. Somewhere near the back of the house the vehicle turned off into a large room partly illuminated by a single flickering oil lamp. There were a few items of heavy furniture parked round the sides of the room, i
ncluding a broken and unmade bed, an oak table with candelabra, a quartet of throne-like chairs, a long, low blanket-box, lidded, and resting on six elegant claw and ball legs, and what appeared to be some kind of iron stove, from which a thick pipe or chimney curved up through the ceiling. All these articles, except the stove, were partly concealed by black muslin drapes that drooped from them at various points, looking for all the world like the snares of some alarmingly overgrown arachnids.
The occupant of the mobile chair, similarly wrapped in a cocoon of peculiarly tailored fustian, whose face had so far not been visible, came to a halt alongside the box, and firmly applied the brake. A masculine voice, plangent, but a little unsteady, like a poorly maintained church harmonium, apologized for not answering the door sooner.
“I was resting. It takes me some time to—to come to myself, when my sleep is disturbed.”
“Asleep at eleven-thirty in the morning!” Sylvia thought. “How demoralized the poor man must be.” She resolved to do something about that.
“It’s all right, mate,” said Mr. Strope. “Don’t worry. We’re in no hurry. We’ve got time on our hands just the same as you have.”
The man in the chair turned toward him and, in doing so, revealed his features. He had hard, round, owlish eyes, a thin, hooked nose, and an apparently lipless, discontented, drooping mouth, more sharply down turned on the left side than the right. His long silver hair was patchy, as though his scalp was diseased, and his face shone like polished ivory in the lamplight. His manner was poised, his expression detached. He held out his hand again toward Mr. Strope. It obviously wasn’t there to be shaken. It took Strope a few seconds to understand the significance of the gesture, before he hurried forward and replaced the key.
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 42
