Heaven's Gate

by Toby Bennett

  “Don’t take it out on the children, Samuel, you will join their numbers soon enough.”

  “I will never serve your damned kind again, Rydal.” The Pilgrim growls back.

  “Then why else are you here?” The speaker laughs. “Let me guess, you came to save these poor unfortunates from my hungry clan, no?” The voice feigns incredulity, “could it be that you came seeking my blood?”

  “I do not seek any innocent blood! I must find the Gate.” The Pilgrim answers stubbornly.

  “And that just happens to mean draining me and conveniently extending your own stolen life? … how good of you, how holy.”

  “Do not mock me, Rydal. I know I am damned, just as you are, but I yet seek redemption. If I must destroy you and all the firstborn to do it, then so much the better. Heaven will know it is part of my penance.”

  “For nights spent with Julia, lapping new life from the blood she spared you? Or for the many deaths you caused in her service?” The mocking voice continues.

  “You know I had no choice in that, besides many of those deaths were as righteous as your own will be.”

  “Oh indeed, even a few of the firstborn. That’s why Julia eventually met her end. It seems, though, that we shouldn’t have overlooked her pet assassin. Who could have known you would have kept hunting us, as she trained you, instead of slinking off to pay the inevitable price for your stolen years?”

  “I do not do this for her,” the words hiss, out over gritted teeth.

  “For whom then? The God you always bleat of? Your soul? I have lived lifetimes of men and the one who turned me knew centuries before that, yet I have never met angel nor demon, there is only us. You have created your own damnation because you are too holy to join us, as your mistress intended and too vain to lose more of the beauty that drew her to you in the first place.”

  From his position on the ground, Bob stares up at the Pilgrim’s face. The man is close enough now, so that despite the shadows cast by his hat, Bob can see clearly enough to realize that this might once have been a truly striking man but only a trace of the beauty to which the speaker refers remains, perhaps the face might still be comely if not darkened by the sun or twisted by rage as it was now, and there is no doubt that the body beneath the long coat is lean, hard and snake quick. Though, if the silver hair is anything to go by, it looked to have been many years since youth could have granted the face the description of beauty.

  “Enough of this!” The Pilgrim barks. “I know your methods, Rydal. You will not turn me with your lies and illusions; to me you are just one more link in a chain. Now, will you come out and face me? Or must I find you?”

  “Ah you come close to speaking the truth there, no more pretence at sanctity. Just one more link in a chain of your need, will it pull you up to your heaven or is it all that is weighing you down? If you were a deeper thinker you might well ask that but what makes you think you could find me even if you wanted to?” The voice asks, suddenly seeming to come from another building entirely. “Would your precious god tell you? Are you on speaking terms?”

  “Come out or I’ll burn down every building in this town, I’ll leave you nowhere to hide from the sun.”

  “What good would I be to you, burnt?”

  “You’re no good to me if I can’t find you, either.”

  “Then we seem to be at an impasse. Tell me how much strength have you already wasted? If I called your bluff and waited for sunrise would you be an old man by then or even just so much dust?”

  “Only one way to find out.” The Pilgrim reaches into a saddlebag and withdraws a bottle of dark liquid. A piece of torn cloth provides a fuse to the primitive explosive, the Pilgrim lights it and tosses it against the wall of the nearest building. The dry timber catches instantly. Under the heat of the smoky flames, the street is bathed in the fierce light of the burning building.

  “You’d have done better to wait for morning, bondling.” The voice growls, all false friendliness gone and dripping with contempt.

  “I had to at least try to help these men.”

  “One more stab at an empty redemption?” The Pilgrim doesn’t answer, merely reaches into his saddlebags again, but before he can withdraw his hand the scene around them ripples.

  If Bob had been able to move his arms he would have rubbed his eyes, the burning building was gone or rather it was restored to its original state. No, more than that, it looked brand new. The great drifts of sand had miraculously vanished from the main street and people, or ghosts, they had to be ghosts to just appear like that, roamed the streets, going about their business as if it were mid-afternoon in any god fearing town in the Union. Indeed, the longer Bob watched the scene, the more he seemed to hear the murmur of their talk and begun to smell earthy smells of horses and livestock. Only the shattered remnants of the mirror still reflected the flickering light of the burning building, like some window into the world of the living, which the cartman felt himself quickly leaving. The mirror and the Pilgrim, blood and pain, these are the only things that make Bob sure he has not joined the throng of figures haunting the old town’s street like a dream or a memory.

  In the middle of the street, Samuel closes his eyes and tries to resist the assault on his senses. The devil had granted his children various gifts and Rydal is a master of illusions; there is no way he can trust his senses now, all he can do is block out the vision and wait for the unholy creature to get closer. The bloodsucker had been right, far better to have sought him out when the sun was high but he’d enough sins to answer for, without adding the crime of simply leaving the cartmen to their fate. Around him the sounds of city life swell, Samuel does his best to ignore them, the more he allows himself to believe in the reality presented by the cunning vampire, the greater Rydal's grip on his mind will be. Carefully he extends his supernatural perception, trying to register the beast that is even now stalking him, hidden somewhere in the scene that is assaulting his senses.

  For his part, Bob Tenant stares helplessly out on an illusion, an illusion which is increasingly becoming a reality for him. The pain and numbness from his many wounds has faded to terrible nausea but he is able to move his fingers again, with agonizing slowness he flicks open his revolver, dropping the spent cartages into the blood stained dirt. Around him the phantoms seem to be oblivious of those dark stains and instead simply step over him complaining loudly about drunks. He had almost come to believe that he was drunk and laid out on the high street of some strange town, when he sees it, a grubby creature, gaunt and twisted, its ragged clothes completely out of place amongst the bright pastels and whites worn by the townsfolk. Somehow it always seemed that there was someone between the hunched monster and the Pilgrim, but apparently it was not bothering to hide itself from Bob. When the thing did spare him a glance Bob did his best to look as awful as he felt, apparently that satisfied it that he was no danger, in fact at one point the grey skinned ghoul spared him a conspiratorial wink and bared a pair of fangs in a ghastly smile. Bob knew the type, though it had never occurred to him that showing off might be a weakness shared by a monster such as this. Being clever wasn’t good enough, it wanted someone to see its genius. Bob resolves to make it regret that arrogance, as he surreptitiously slides a bullet from his belt and tries to force it into the empty chamber of his revolver with shaking fingers.

  Samuel holds his breath now, trying to find some way to penetrate the false perceptions that surround him. Had something just touched him? Was that laughter or breath against his ear? Near his throat? His hand tightened on his sabre’s hilt but he dared not move until he was sure of his target, once he moved from the position where he knew he was standing, Rydal might subtly manoeuver him anywhere. Better to wait and respond to attack than to flail about and succumb to Rydal's trap. With iron discipline, he stands stock still in the middle of the street, awaiting the impact of a bullet, the sharp touch of a blade or worse of all the pressure of teeth. Again the laugh echoes around him, full of triumph, cut off abruptly by the
sound of gunfire.

  The recoil feels like the kick of horse and Bob’s hand flails backwards, but his aim is true and the undead creature jerks with the impact of the bullet. The creature whirls on Bob fixing the upstart with furious, bloodshot eyes, too late Rydal remembers the greater danger and turns back to face Samuel’s onslaught. The grey claws sweep up to ward off the Pilgrim’s attack and Bob laughs to think that the creature could hope to resist the razor edge of the sword with only empty hands, but to his surprise the Pilgrim lets the weapon drop. The two come together in a blurred melee of impossible ferocity, Rydal's claws and fangs drawing blood from the bigger man’s chest and arms, until, with an exercise of pure strength and unflinching will the Pilgrim brings his own flat, strong teeth down upon the neck of the struggling vampire. With no hollow fangs, Samuel’s work is necessarily gory, with sharp jerking motions he worries open the throat of the undead thing, gulping sickening mouthfuls of fetid blood and drawing with it the strength of the damned creature. Bob watches this conflict with horror, without the strength to load another bullet into his gun or any faith that it would do him any good anyway. He spends the seemingly endless seconds of the struggle reminding himself that, however ruthless the Pilgrim seemed to be or what hungers might drive him, the man had said he’d intervened in order to help.

  At length Samuel feels that he has taken all the strength from Rydal that he can, he throws his head back, sick with remorse and horror at what he is forced to do to simply survive. The Lord’s Prayer will not come. He cannot mention his daily bread with this carrion slumped in his arms like a tired lover and the slow dark gore as his communion wine.

  “Forgive us our trespasses,” he manages to stammer out to the star-filled sky, “As we forgive those who trespass against us.”

  There is no release in it. There never is, no matter how pious his intent, the black miasma of blood is still thick in his throat; the sin of Cain; the lusts of Gomorra; a vile mockery of Christ’s Eucharist. Another black soul has joined his own on its quest for salvation. Already he can feel Rydal taking his place with the others, his knowledge and power oozing slowly through him on a tide of unholy blood, ladening his soul with more sin, viewed in grizzly flashes, experienced from behind the eyes of a monster. Helpless to stop it, he bends under the weight of new sins that were not his, until he claimed them with the rite of blood, crimes and vices that could not be shed with regret or prayer. Those sins and many others, committed or stolen, would weigh yet heavier on him if he allowed himself to die. Samuel knew he was not ready for that reckoning, he had felt the pain of God’s judgement nearly fifty years ago, when Julia had died. Those years under her thrall were still only fleeting images in his memory but robbed of her unholy vitality, he had soon found they took a terrible toll on him. In the space of a single afternoon his youth had been torn from him and only the scent of new blood, ripe with unholy corruption had saved him from inevitable death and judgement.

  Samuel had been raised religious, even if his mistress had led him from that path; he knew all too well what death represented to the damned. Even if his soul might have shaken off the stain of his sins before he began his existence as hunter, hope had been lost forever when he had been forced to sustain himself on the sluggish blood of the Strigoi. Blake knew what death meant to the damned and the first monster he had wolfed down in frenzied desperation had marked him as one of their number. He no longer had tears enough to wash himself clean and he doubted the strength his own contrition. That poisoned chalice had offered him escape from his own mortality, a temporary reprieve from judgement but robbed him of mortal hope and set him on his long journey.

  While there was life there was hope of redemption, he had to believe that. A Gate of silver fire had been little more than a whisper in the mind of his first desperate kill, an echo from one of the beast’s earlier victims, but it had planted a seed that had grown in to an all consuming obsession. For years now, the vision had grown clearer, a secret held by the oldest of the damned, a Gateway of fire that reached to Heaven itself and each kill brought him closer to this salvation each drop of blood staved off a judgement he could not appeal, while he sought another way into Heaven.

  The thick cough of the cartman brings him back from his introspection. The elation of the kill is often followed by such fruitless self-examination, as his reason reasserts itself. Samuel seals his mind against the dark thoughts and self-loathing and instead mechanically goes to retrieve his weapon. He is damned just as surely now as he had been before the killing. One more mark on a stained soul makes no difference, God does not see in greys and nor can he. There is nothing for Samuel to do but live with it.

  The blade scrapes on the sand and the dry wood of the burning building crackles in the heat. No doubt the lesser vampires were in hiding now but he would find them without Rydal to hide them, to reawake the ghosts of this abandoned town. Guiltily he wonders how the town had been destroyed, he hoped it was vampires rather than the Inquisition, the sword in his hand was an officer’s and he was not innocent of the zealotry that had fired that particular cause; it had taken him some years to realize that their actions were more motivated by the interests of great men than God’s will on earth.

  “Help me.” Bob Tenant’s voice barely rises above the crackle of flames.

  “I will, brother.” The Pilgrim says, raising his sabre and advancing.

  “No.” Bob begs as he discerns the Pilgrim’s intention

  “There is no help for it.” The man says, firmly, staring through him with cold hard eyes.

  “You would not wish to wake to the damnation they would drag you into. I will pray with you, you will have salvation.”

  “What do you mean? Just bind my wounds and get me up on the cart.”

  “You have lost too much blood and they have filled you with their poison, even now you are becoming one of them. I am sorry but it is for your soul’s sake.”

  “No! Please!” Bob begs.

  “I will not leave here until every bloodsucker is destroyed, at least you may find redemption now.” The Pilgrim’s reply brooks no argument.

  “I don’t care about that! I don’t care about your damned Crusade! Just get me out of here and I’ll make you rich. Give the money to a priest if it makes you happy but I want to live.”

  “It is too late for that.” The man says sadly, simply.

  “I saved your life.” Bob whines.

  “And I’m saving your soul.” The Pilgrim answers, raising the sword and bringing it down as quickly as his mercy demands.

  This time the Lord’s Prayer comes, along with passages half remembered from a childhood more than a century past, the Pilgrim is still reciting them when Robert Tenant’s head rolls to a stop, the only thing reflected in the shards of a cracked mirror, apart from dying flames, as red as blood.

  Chapter 2:

  “Across an Ocean of Sand.”

  Innumerable grains of sand wash through the clown’s empty eye sockets, yellow grains shifting like the last seconds wrung from an hourglass. The clown resists the temptation to count them, it is a failing of his kind, of the dead, who have eternity to spend on such abstraction. Instead he sits up abruptly, his bleached-bone face dislodging all but a few of the dry particles from its smooth contours in a single motion. His much abused clothing is harder to clear of sand but a few blows against his empty ribcage send the yellow grains tumbling back to the desert floor. Satisfied at last, the skeletal troubadour reaches into his tattered suit of bells and rainbow hued, shabby velvet and draws forth a flute. Air hisses between teeth worn down to nubs by the endless sand and despite the lack of lips, produces a low, sad tune. This tune is the last remnant of a life long lost, the last spark of the soul that once animated the perpetually grinning clown. At the urging of some will other than its own, the clown sniffs the wind, allowing it to waft through the ragged hole in the centre of his bony face, then sets off across the featureless sand.

  Half the buildings of the old town are smolderi
ng embers by the time the flute’s music touches the scene near the abandoned cart. A lizard, more timid than the carrion birds sharing in the feast of quickly drying flesh, scurries frantically into the gloom beneath the carts, finding cool relief in the shaded sand. The bone clown’s gaping eyes take in the scene with all the indifference of a cannon bore. Nearly twenty bodies lie hacked and strewn about the half buried tracks. After a minute or so of studying the carnage the clown stops his soft tune and pricks up his head, causing the rusty bells dangling from his loose hat to jingle. This in turn sends the carrion birds, which had so far managed to ignore both his tune and his presence, spilling into the air in response to the sudden jarring sound.

  A voice, no louder than the buzzing flies, echoes through the clown’s cranial cavity. It is no insect, though, anything of any interest to that kind has long been picked clean. It is something else that stirs in the endless darkness behind that bleached skull. From within the emptiness of his skull other eyes share his vision and it is their voices to which the clown now listens.

  “You see, he will make a fair tool if used correctly.”

  “Never that, the living are flawed tools at best. Brother, we should not be complacent in this one’s strength, it could be turned against us as easily as against the vampires. Remember we thought Leedon could be easily used and though he has not outlived his usefulness, each year he becomes harder to control.” Another buzzing whisper replies.