by James Fahy
“I need your teeth,” Gio growled, “but we have a little time to play yet. It doesn’t matter to me what state the rest of you is in.”
His breath was hot on my neck. I stared down into the pit, my eyes wide.
“I don’t like being made a fool of twice. I think it’s time for you to find out what happened to your friends.”
Before I could react, he pushed me lightly in the back. For one horrible, timeless moment, I teetered on the lip of the stone pit. From the corner of my eye, I could see the Bonewalker watching me. Its pale mask was stone, its black eyes glittering. Helena and Jessica were behind it, both leaning against the sofa looking thoroughly unconcerned, as though this were the most normal thing in the world. Jessica was still sipping her steaming coffee.
And then I fell – arms flailing, into the darkness below with an unheroic shriek.
25
The pit wasn’t as deep as I’d imagined. I fell for maybe a couple of seconds before I hit the floor painfully in the darkness, jarring my knees badly as I fell, sprawling on my front and grazing the skin off my hands.
I managed to land partially on my side, preventing my head from smacking against the floor but winding myself terribly in the process. I lay gasping for a few seconds. The ground beneath my hands was wet. It was two or three inches deep in rank water or sewage, I couldn’t tell which.
I rolled painfully onto my back and stared up at the circle of light above me. At least I hadn’t broken anything. Gio was silhouetted against the well’s mouth, and he gave a little wave.
“Enjoy your family time,” he called down to me. “We’ll be back to pick up the teeth shortly.”
I couldn’t have replied if I’d wanted to; the air had been knocked out of my lungs. I forced myself to get to my knees despite the screaming pain.
So much for feeling hale and hearty.
I was guessing my miraculous healing after the bike accident had something to do with Gio feeding from me. Had it mended me? With the first moment’s leisure I’d had since waking up, my aching hand went to my neck. I’d expected a ragged wound, but there was nothing I could feel there other than two small lumps, tender to the touch. Vampire bites, nothing more. If I hadn’t just been thrown down a pit of death, I’d be feeling fit and ready to take on the world.
The stench down here was terrible. In the darkness, strange shapes surrounded me, lumps on the wet floor. Piles of garbage?
Before I could investigate, I heard a commotion above. Raised voices. Were the vampires arguing amongst themselves?
And then I heard a phone ringing. The everyday sound seemed ridiculous in this setting. The tinny sound of Gary Numan’s ‘Cars’ floated down to me – just the opening bars, over and over. It was my ringtone.
I make no apologies. Retro pre-war classics are not to be sneered at.
The bastards had my phone up there, probably taken when I’d been grabbed, and now someone was calling me.
No one ever called me.
“Boss,” a male voice said, up in the room. “We have a situation upstairs.”
I was guessing another member of the Sacrament.
“What are you talking about?” Gio’s voice demanded, over the electro pop. “Will someone turn that damn thing off?!”
I heard the clatter of heels across the flagstones – Jessica I guessed – and the ringing phone stopped.
“There are people outside, upstairs in the street,” the new male vampire was saying, sounding worried. “A lot of them. I think … I think they’re Cabal.”
A flurry of expletives filled the room above me. I struggled unsteadily to my feet in the muck. They all started talking at once.
“How?” Gio demanded silencing the others. “No one could know we are here!”
“Gio, we need to deal with this, now,” Helena’s voice was calm and reasonable as always. “They’ve no reason to come down here. But if the Cabal are snooping around—”
“I’ll fucking deal with them,” Gio snapped. “Get upstairs, all of you. They can’t possibly know we have the boy and the woman here. There’s no way they could. We weren’t followed. I’ll get rid of them.”
I heard them all leave. The door slammed.
Leaving me alone in the dark pit.
I was panicking more than a little. But if what they said was true, if Cabal were here (wherever here was) and snooping around Gio’s secret den…
A tiny glimmer of hope ignited in my chest.
They would want to come in, look around. The Cabal had the right to do that everywhere, all as part of the common interest legislature. And if the vampires of the Black Sacrament resisted or refused, there would be trouble. You didn’t refuse Cabal.
Had the cavalry really arrived? Tracked me here somehow? I had no idea how anyone could. Then, up there in the room I had fallen from, my phone started to ring again.
Of course, my mobile, I thought. GPS.
Vampires, for all their insistence that they had moved with the times, apparently were not that up on basic tech.
It would be Cloves behind it no doubt, tracking my whereabouts like a true government snoop. For once I was grateful for her stalking me. She must have had my phone tapped. I wondered if she was here in person or if she had just sent a fleet of Cabal ghosts, hopefully armed to the teeth.
As I stared up, a black shape suddenly leaned over the lip of the pit. It was the Bonewalker. It hadn’t left with the others. Was it staying behind to guard me? Or just to creep me the hell out?
The sight of the GO staring down at me like an empty-eyed corpse startled me, its face as unsympathetic as a store mannequin. I stepped backwards, losing my footing in the pit, and fell over one of the large misshapen lumps. I lay sprawled in the muck again, spitting out rancid water and cursing the creepy shit above me with every foul word I could think of.
“I suppose you think that’s funny, do you?” I yelled up furiously. My voice was cracking with fear. “Well screw you, you big silent bed sheet-wearing fuck!”
My hand grabbed at the lumpy mass to steady myself, and I froze. I had grabbed a forearm. Shakily, I felt along the length of the cold wet limb, my eyes straining to see in the darkness.
I had just fallen over a body.
A wispy nodule atop what I guessed was the torso bobbed at my grasping fingers and, at my fumbling, the head of the corpse wobbled on its neck and fell with a crack to face me.
I screamed.
It was a good scream. I didn’t know I could scream like that. People did in old black and white horror movies, but I had always thought it was a little over the top. Apparently as I now discovered, when occasion demanded, it was pretty bloody fitting.
It was difficult to make out in the darkness, but I was staring at the ravaged, bloody-mouthed face of a young woman. Her blank, staring eyes were wide, already covered with a filmy cataract of death; her face leered at me like a monster from a haunted house, the lips and chin coated in a thick crusty beard of dried blood. I dropped the dead arm and scooted backward in the muck on my rear. Goosebumps were fluttering up my arms.
Her head had long matted dreadlocks, glued together with filth and blood. She was even still wearing her ultra-hip glasses, though they were askew on her face in a way that would have been comical if she hadn’t been so extremely dead and extremely close to me.
There was no mistaking the identity of this body. I had seen her face on the DataStream only yesterday morning at Cloves’ apartment. This rotting, disfigured corpse was Jennifer Coleman, the GO activist. Her teeth may well be sitting in a box at Blue Lab, but the rest of her was inches from me in a stinking charnel pit, merrily decomposing.
I covered my mouth to cut off my scream, my hand shaking uncontrollably. I almost bit my fingers off. Far above me, I was dimly aware of loud noises in the building above; shouts and crashes above the basement. Was a there a struggle going on up there? What the hell was happening? Were the Cabal storming the building?
I risked a look upwards. In the baseme
nt room at the top of the well, all was calm. The Bonewalker still stared down at me, utterly unmoved by my macabre discovery. I wondered if the body here was its handiwork.
I had shuffled back so far into the darkness that my back hit another soft object. I jumped away from it with a yelp. My nerves were utterly gone. I turned, wide-eyed.
This second lump was a body as well; face down in the water, its arms and legs splayed at odd angles and its ample frame bunched up. It looked as though it had been either unconscious or dead when it was thrown in the pit. From the smell, I’d say it was definitely dead now.
I couldn’t see its face, but I saw that one of its legs was missing a shoe. Oh dear God.
Swallowing the urge to cry uncontrollably and vomit at the same time, which would have been neither brave nor useful, I forced myself to inch back toward the bloated, waterlogged corpse instead.
Through some tremendous overriding of natural instinct, I kicked at the shoulder a few times with the toe of my shoe, each time uttering a small ‘ew ew ew’ noise of revulsion. Ultimately, I made the body roll over in the shallow water so it lay face up.
I slowly lowered my still trembling hand from my mouth.
“Oh Vyvienne,” I breathed, staring at the ruined face in the darkness.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that the wide, empty stare or the sunken, toothless mouth, bloody as though it had been painted with too much glossy lipstick.
I had found Trevelyan at last. What was left of her.
“I’m so sorry.”
Most people have wished their manager dead at least once during a particularly frustrating day at the office. I was no different, but this was not an end I would have wished on my worst enemy. She had never been much of a looker in my opinion, but having the inside of your face removed and then floating face down in sewage for a couple of days was never going to make much of an improvement.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget that face. Thank God for the darkness.
I was shaking all over. Gio and his Black Sacrament buddies had taken these women, torn out their teeth and thrown them away like garbage down this godforsaken pit.
We were nothing to them. We weren’t people. We were offerings, just lumps of meat to be harvested. And now they had Oscar and me too. I didn’t want to end up like this.
I wouldn’t even be in this mess if Trevelyan hadn’t gotten me involved. Obviously she had known something about our fathers’ past which I did not. I only knew my father had been a biologist. It’s partly the reason I went into science myself; to honour his memory. But by the time I was born, our world had changed. He was drafted into the wars as an Army Medic. He was an old man when he died, leaving me clueless. I wish I’d spent more time hacking her system, although all that had been left was the Military Application details. I was guessing whatever was going on was to do with a different department she had been involved in. What had they been? Archives and Development?
I had lost the photo I had stolen from her house somewhere in the chaos at the library, but I remembered what it had said underneath.
Me and the Development Team
What the hell did you know that I didn’t, Trevelyan?
I fought between the twin urges to cry over her body with horror at her death, and kicking it repeatedly in frustration.
Above us, the Bonewalker still stared down impassively, and beyond the door I heard more shouting and what sounded like muffled gunfire. My eyes roamed around the pit. They were becoming adjusted to the darkness down here.
It was a small space no more than twenty feet across, an oubliette at the bottom of the well shaft. There was no way in or out that I could see. The crumbly walls were too slick with slime and water to consider climbing. And besides, I doubted the Bonewalker would just let me haul myself out at the top. Although it might. Who knew what their kind were actually thinking?
Against my instincys, I forced myself to look at the corpses of the two women. For God’s sake Phoebe, they’re just dead bodies. You’re a Doctor, it’s not like you haven’t seen dead people before. Get a grip.
And that’s when my roaming eye saw that one of the late Jennifer Coleman’s legs had been gnawed on. It was a ragged, bloody stump. Interesting fact about vampires: they don’t eat human flesh. They will drink you dry if you let them and sometimes, I had most recently discovered, even if you didn’t. However, they weren’t, as far as I knew, much into the habit of ripping off chunks of flesh to eat.
Beyond Coleman’s body, I noticed another dark shape, a lump hunched against the wall. As I noticed it, I saw that it wasn’t another body, not a dead one anyway.
It was something crouched, very still in the darkness-now that I had seen it, I realised that its chest was moving quickly. It lurked in the shadows, watching me with interest. Quickly I realised, it was the source of the animal smell.
I moved backwards, very, very slowly, barely making a ripple in the fetid sludge. Its head twitched and I froze, watching as it cocked its head to one side as though it were sniffing blindly for me.
I gave it a moment and then moved slowly away again, my heart thudding in my chest. I tried to manoeuvre so that the remains of Jennifer Coleman were between me and the thing, but it also moved forward, slowly, stealthily. It was stalking me in the darkness. It came toward me enough that the dim light which fell from the well shaft above threw some faint illumination on its shape.
It had bald, skull-like features, as though the bones were protruding against its tightly drawn, mottled grey skin. It was naked as a babe with scrawny, sinew covered arms and legs, and an emaciated sunken chest.
Slowly, it slithered on all fours in my direction. Its lower face was all long sharp teeth, grinning like a demon in the darkness. Its eyes were dark pits.
A Pale.
Gio and his buddies were keeping one of the Pale in this pit as a pet. Vampires, Bonewalkers, and now this?
“Oh, come on!” I complained aloud to the universe. “Seriously?”
This was the second Pale I had seen in as many days. The first had been behind toughened glass and sedated with nerve gas, and it had still scared the hell out of me. You can imagine how I felt at the bottom of a dark well full of corpses, with one of them circling me in the gloom, eyeing me hungrily.
Fuck. I was going to die. There were no two ways about it. The Pale killed. It was what they did – what they were made to do.
If I’d been holding a machine gun, I might have stood a slim chance against one of them in a confined space. As it was, armed with nothing but harsh language and the freshest meat this man-made ghoul had seen all day, I was well and truly shafted. No down-the-well pun intended.
I wondered briefly if it would be disrespectful of me to try and wrench off the rest of Jennifer Coleman’s leg and at least use that like a club. It wouldn’t stop the nightmarish bastard from tearing me to pieces, but I could at least go down fighting. I might even land a few good blows before it took me down. I could die kicking my murderer in the head with someone else’s foot.
The Pale growled deeply at me. It hadn’t attacked me yet. Was it sated, only just fed? Or just taking it’s time? I had nowhere to run after all.
I had time to wonder whether Trevelyan and Coleman had been dead already when their bodies were discarded down here, or if Gio’s crew had let their Bonewalker friend harvest their teeth and then just thrown the women down here, still alive. A little entertainment for the monster.
I hoped they were dead beforehand. Gio hadn’t bothered taking my teeth, whatever the hell they were needed for. He had Oscar’s to play with for now. He had wanted me down here beforehand, with this thing, for fun.
If I ever got out of here, I swore I would kill that vampire myself.
The Pale opened its mouth slightly, a long rattling hiss escaping its throat. I could see its breath clouding. It was cold down here. I braced and gritted my teeth as I saw the beast lower into a deeper crouch. It was getting ready to pounce, to throw itself at me. I had s
econds to act.
Above me, the noise was getting worse. The vampires of the Black Sacrament had clearly not cooperated with the authorities. I heard something slam repeatedly, twice, three times. Someone was throwing themselves against the door up there, trying to shoulder it open.
I glanced upwards. The Bonewalker had turned away, no longer looking down but away from the well, at the door to the basement.
“Help me!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, hoping to hell that it was the Cabal guys at the door.
There was definitely a skirmish of some kind going on up there. Had they forced their way in?
“Hey, I’m down here!”
The sound of my voice seemed to startle the Pale. Did it regard my bellowing as a show of aggression? A warning? Whatever it thought, it didn’t like it. It roared at me – an inhuman, low shriek.
Above me came the sound of splintering wood, and then a familiar voice.
“Doctor!”
Was that Allesandro?
I couldn’t see the Bonewalker above me anymore. My whole attention was on the Pale, mainly because it had just made its move, throwing itself toward me through the darkness, jaws open, claws outstretched. Jesus, it was fast.
I threw myself to the floor, splashing into the water so that the abomination sailed above me. I slammed against Jennifer Coleman’s body and instinctively grabbed at it, pulling it into a macabre bear hug and rolling it over so that I was beneath it, the water almost closing over me. I felt the Pale land atop the corpse, heavy and urgent. It began to rip and tear into what it thought was its prey, as I rolled out from under the poor woman above me.
I would feel bad later. The way I saw it, she was already dead. She wouldn’t mind. I, on the other hand, wanted to stay alive as long as possible, even if that was only the next few seconds.
I crawled away through the muck on my stomach.
“Phoebe!”
The voice called out to me from above. It was definitely Allesandro. I heard struggling, was he fighting the Bonewalker? Could you even fight them?
