Lockhart's Legacy (Vespari Lockhart Book 1)

by J. Stone

  As they approached, Wynonna caught sight of a shadow moving about inside. They were home, at least. The pair kept moving forward, Lockhart leaning on her for support and both exhausted from their nearly nonstop travels. They passed a rickety wooden fence that didn’t quite enclose the house and garden growing there. Leaving Lockhart leaning on a fence post, Wynonna slipped to the side of the fence, through the opening, and headed toward the structure in the middle.

  The door of the house slammed open and a wild looking old man stepped out with a shotgun. He fired a blast straight up in the air and then aimed it back down toward them, smoke still funneling out of the barrel.

  “Stop right there!” he demanded.

  “Woah!” Wynonna replied, holding her hands up in front of her. “Easy there.”

  Lockhart tried to say something, but he just coughed and sputtered instead.

  “What are you doing here?” the old man asked.

  “He’s sick,” Wynonna told him, nodding to Lockhart. “We were just hoping for some shelter for the night. Maybe some food if you were feeling generous.”

  “Who are you? What are you doing out in the desert at night?”

  “He’s a vespari. I’m his apprentice.”

  The old man lowered his shotgun toward the ground. “Vespari, you say?” He stared at Lockhart. “He certainly looks like one, but you. Didn’t think they made women into vespari.”

  “And why not? You think women can’t be just as strong as men? I’m still standing aren’t I? While carrying his ass around too.”

  The hermit completely dropped the gun down to his side. “Didn’t mean nothing by it,” he told her. “Just never heard of one’s all.”

  “Well, you have now.”

  “S-s-stop antagonizing him,” Lockhart muttered.

  “I’m not. Shut up.” Wynonna looked back at the old man. “So, what do you say? You going to help us out or not?”

  The hermit turned around, placed the shotgun just inside the door, and gestured for them to follow. “Come inside,” he told them.

  Wynonna went back to Lockhart, once again helping him walk, and they both followed the old man in. They passed through the doorway, and she sat the vespari down in a handmade wooden chair. Behind her, the old man closed the door and came around to join them, sitting in another chair across the way.

  In the light, Wynonna got a better look at the man who’d let them in. The old hermit’s hair was a tangled, greasy mess. His skin was dirty, covered in grime from living out in the desert for so long. His eyes were fierce but sunk in his skull. They pierced out regardless and had a shifty quality, always ticking back and forth across his vision. He had on no shirt, and because of it, Wynonna saw his ribs through his skin, like he were impoverished. His pants had become so tattered that they were now effectively shorts, and on his feet, he wore no shoes. They looked like toughened leather because of it though.

  His apparent home was in a similar condition. He’d constructed the furniture and building itself out of whatever materials the man could find. There was no real evidence of city life anywhere in his ramshackle abode. Despite his gaunt appearance, the hermit had no shortage of food. In fact, over a crackling fire, he’d situated a pot of what smelled like a stew of some sort, the thick scent of herbs wafting from it. Something spicy, if she were to guess.

  Since joining Lockhart and vowing to become a vespari, Wynonna hadn’t had anything in the way of a properly cooked meal. Her master wasn’t much of a cook, and she fared no better. The idea of a fresh cooked stew proved an appetizing allure.

  “What about some food?” Wynonna asked, wasting no time.

  The hermit chuckled. “I will trade you for it.”

  “W-w-we have a few silver r-rounds,” Lockhart told him.

  The old man shook his head. “I have no need of rounds for I have all I need here. Nor do I require your services. No monsters live with me here. No, if you want what is mine…” He trailed off, thinking.

  “What?” Wynonna asked.

  The old man’s eyes illuminated. “You will have to tell me a tale of what it is like to be a vespari.”

  Wynonna shook her head and frowned. “I’ve only just become an apprentice. I don’t have any stories for you.”

  The hermit pointed to Lockhart. “What about him? He must have stories to tell.”

  “I’m n-n-no story teller.”

  “Clearly, but I suspect you have seen more than most. Done more than most. Tell me of your past. Tell me what it is to be a vespari.”

  “He can hardly even sit upright,” she told him. “I don’t think a story is too likely.”

  “No tale, no food,” the old man said with a little laugh.

  Wynonna looked from the stew over to the vespari. Her stomach growled as if on cue.

  “Very w-w-well,” Lockhart said, forcing himself to sit upright. “I’ll t-tell you a story.”

  ***

  The words came slowly to Corrigan Lockhart’s dry and blistered lips. His stutter troubled him, but with time, the story became easier to tell. The stutter grew less and less frequent the further along he got and the more comfortable he found himself. Both the old hermit and Wynonna paid close attention as he told them of how he first became a vespari.

  His tale started with the disappearance of a friend back in his home of Alexandria. The boy’s name was Levi, and in the squalor, which Corrigan lived, Levi was the best thing he had. Several other children had gone missing in recent times. Only one had been recovered and not in one piece. The police found the body inside a bag, floating in the city’s sewage, sliced into unrecognizable chunks and wholly unidentifiable as the boy people had once known. The only things the police had to identify him were a necklace and a series of birthmarks. The young Corrigan hadn’t known this other child well, but he feared that the same would happen to his friend when he went missing.

  Levi had helped to take care of Corrigan when others refused. His stutter always held him back. Teachers and other adults thought him stupid. The children teased him. In all, most people neglected Corrigan, but Levi was different. Levi treated him like a true friend when no others would.

  The boy was better than the others. Not just in his treatment of Corrigan. He was quite intelligent too. Teachers doted on him. The other children looked up to and respected him. When Levi defended Corrigan, they would leave him alone for a time. Levi saw to it that Corrigan got what he needed. He helped teach him when the adults refused. He played with him when the other children wouldn’t. Corrigan could see that Levi would become something great when he grew up. He knew he had no such future. He was a poor, neglected thing and would be lucky to survive his childhood.

  Corrigan didn’t know how to react to the news of his friend’s disappearance. Everyone else went about their lives, soon forgetting the boy and his absence. They told him that Levi’s disappearance had been the result of a monster. They told him that a vespari would come to deal with the culprit sooner or later. Corrigan waited weeks, and there was no sign of justice for the monster.

  Then, someone reported another disappearance. This time, it was a little girl, and again, the body could not be located. Corrigan couldn’t remember the girl’s name after all those years. And still, no one did anything to find the missing children or punish the monster, which had done it. No vespari appeared to right this wrong.

  Corrigan refused to let this stand. Levi deserved better. He decided that he had to do something about this monster hunting children in Alexandria. He would find the creature responsible, kill it, and save Levi. His friend was destined for great things, and he would gladly sacrifice himself if it meant bringing him back. Levi had saved Corrigan countless times. He would do everything in his power to do the same now.

  Corrigan knew he could not hope to save his friend without a proper weapon though. Revolvers and other guns were expensive, and he didn’t even know an adult who had one. That meant he would have to find a knife. He could only think of one reliable place to find
a blade that would suit his needs. Corrigan’s largely absent father was a butcher, and as such, he had a variety of knives to suit all manner of needs. The man was a violent drunk, however, and Corrigan often avoided going home so as not to incite his wrath. He would make an exception for Levi.

  The boy waited until night had fallen over Alexandria, until when his father had typically passed out. Their home was on the floor above the butcher shop, so he stood outside, watching for the shadows in the window to stop moving. The candlelight still flickered through the glass, but oftentimes it did not die down until the morning hours, so it’s lingering light wasn’t too strange or ominous as to prevent him from following through with his plan. When Corrigan saw no movement, he approached the butcher shop and made his way to the back door.

  The downstairs was completely dark, and peeking through a window, he saw no sign of his father. Having learned how to pick a lock, Corrigan had no difficulty finding his way inside the shop. Creeping into the back, where the smell of bloody meat consumed all else, his heart began to beat quicker. His palms sweated, and his hands shook and trembled. His eyes raced through the butcher shop, searching for a knife. He wanted to get it and get out of there as soon as possible.

  Corrigan crept up to a countertop where his brute of a father hacked into the meat. He had to have left something there. A glint of metal shone in the dark, reflecting a light from the street. Seeing it, Corrigan hurried toward the cleaver, only to slip on a pool of animal blood slowly pouring into a drain. He flailed his arms as he fell, trying to catch himself, but instead, he hit a tray of metal tools which crashed to the floor. Lying there, in that pool of blood, struggling to breathe, Corrigan heard the stomp on the second level. He’d roused his father from his drunken stupor.

  The boy tried to get up, but his body was slow and weak after the fall. He had only just got to his feet when his father made it down the stairs and turned toward the back room. Corrigan tried to go for the knife he’d seen before the fall so that he could flee that place, but his father, despite the booze, was quicker.

  The drunk grabbed Corrigan’s shirt by its back collar with his big, thick fingers. “Look what you’ve done, you clumsy idiot!” his father shouted.

  The boy struggled to get free from his father’s clutches, but his attempts were in vain. His father grabbed his arm and twirled him around. He raised his hand and smacked him across the face, sending him right back down to the ground with a hard thud.

  “Well, say something, dummy!” his father taunted.

  Corrigan pursed his lips tightly together, refusing to utter a single, stuttering word, as a trail of blood dripped down from his nose.

  “Dumber than that whore mother of yours,” the brute said.

  Corrigan clenched his hand into a fist and glared at his father.

  “Oh? What? You going to do something?”

  The boy managed to stand and backed away from his father.

  “That’s what I thought. An idiot and a coward to boot.”

  He’d misunderstood Corrigan’s intentions. The boy hadn’t meant to flee his father but rather to position himself closer to the blade. He cut his eyes over to the glinting metal and took one more step back, now within reach of the cleaver. With a quickness the man’s drunk eyes could hardly follow, Corrigan snatched the knife and pried it from the wood cutting board it had been wedged into.

  His father laughed. “What do you think you’re going to do with that, you little shit?”

  Corrigan tightened and loosened his grip on the handle of the blade, not quite sure himself. Even though the alcohol slowed his father down, he didn’t want to try fighting him. The man was a hulking giant compared to him, and the cleaver wasn’t going to give him enough of an advantage. No, he would have to try something else. Looking to the table on his other side, Corrigan spotted a meat tenderizer. He picked it up with his free hand and chucked it right at his father’s head.

  The drunk was too slow to get out of its way, and the metal tool struck his forehead hard. The man groaned, bending over and holding the wound. When he looked up, his eyes had lost all of the fuzziness of his drunken state. He glared at Corrigan and growled.

  “You’re going to pay for that, boy!”

  Corrigan stepped back, while his father stepped forward. That same pool of blood that Corrigan had slipped on was still there, however, and just like the boy had, the man slid in the blood and fell. He landed with a heavy thud on the ground, and Corrigan wasted no time. He sprung forward, using his father’s gut as a stepping-stone and leaping toward the back door. His father was hurt, but he wasn’t out yet. He reached out and grabbed Corrigan’s ankle as he leapt, tripping the boy as he landed.

  “You’re not going anywhere!” the man shouted.

  Corrigan hardly even thought about the action, and he gripped the cleaver, swinging it down into his father’s wrist. The man screamed, as the blade sliced right through bone and muscle. Released, Corrigan scurried away and finally escaped, leaving the screams of his father behind him and sure that he could never go home again. No great loss, he decided. Finding and saving Levi was far more important than that small bedroom above a butcher’s shop. Since his mother’s death, his home had offered him little more than dread and pain.

  Leaving the drunk and now mutilated butcher behind, Corrigan prepared to start his search for Levi. He knew exactly where he had to go. The only body that the police had found had wedged into a pipe in a stream of sewage. This one clue made him suspect that the monster had to live somewhere down in the sewers. Alexandria was an ancient city, built on top of older civilizations, and as such, the tunnels running under the city were a sprawling labyrinth of varying origins. Finding one creature among crypts, mines, and the more recently constructed sewers could prove an impossible task, but he vowed to find Levi no matter what the cost was to him.

  Arriving at the drain in question, Corrigan realized the blood of whatever animals his father had slaughtered and sliced up that day still covered him. He considered cleansing himself of the gore, but upon careful consideration decided to leave it on. Perhaps the smell would draw the monster that had taken his friend. If nothing else, the blood gave him a gruesome appearance and served as a strange source of courage to him. So, wearing that blood as a sort of mental armor, Corrigan dropped down into the sewer to start his search.

  There were numerous stories of what was down in those depths. Long before Alexandria was established, the original inhabitants erected a series of monuments to dead rulers of the past. Their grand tombs still resided under the city streets and were just one small portion of what the sewers had become. Later, they mined the area, in search of rare minerals and other shiny rocks. Long shafts ran underneath the city, some having caved in over the years, some with the miners still trapped within. No one really knew what lurked within those tunnels, but Corrigan found himself in the newest portions of it.

  Slimy, discolored, moss-covered bricks lined the sewers, and down the middle of the tunnel, a steady stream of filth flowed. The sound of dripping water echoed all around him, and the smell was nearly enough to knock him over. Being the son of a butcher, Corrigan knew foul odors, but this was something altogether different. The only light entering those tunnels came in the form of the candlelit lamps from the street above and the scarce bit of starlight that managed to creep through grates and slits above him. After a few minutes, his eyes adjusted to this new darkness, and the boy started to move through those tunnels with deftness.

  Having lived mostly on the street since his mother died, Corrigan had a decent understanding of Alexandria’s layout. He didn’t know the sewers nearly as well, but he at least understood where the water flowed to and from. Given where the sliced up body had been found, he knew roughly where it had to have been dropped in the waters. Whether that would lead him to the monster’s lair, he would have to wait to find out.

  As he moved in that direction, Corrigan gripped the cleaver in his hand and swept his eyes quickly from one si
de of the sewers to the other. He wasn’t sure what kind of creature he was looking for. He’d only heard stories as to the kinds of monsters a vespari hunted. The nosferatu, the lycanthrope, and the living dead were among the more popular stories that children told each other in the dark. How much of that information was accurate and usable was questionable, but he didn’t believe that any of those monsters would have been responsible for this.

  He’d also heard tales of vile creatures living in the sewers, most of them having some connection to the city’s long, storied past. Maybe some ancient creature had awoken from its slumber and had need for children. His young mind couldn’t wrap around a possible reason for such a need, but he hoped that whatever it was that Levi was still alive. Only one body of the missing children had surfaced, after all. He took that as a reason for hope.

  Despite his forced optimism, Corrigan couldn’t help but think of his friend in a similar state as the boy that the police found. Stuffed in a bag, sliced up so much that no one could recognize him. Mutilated, tortured, and lifeless. His grip tightened on that cleaver every time those images appeared in his head. He had no idea to what depths he would sink if his friend really had died, but in that darkness, he saw no bottom to the pit inside his heart.

  Continuing to trace the sewage stream, Corrigan eventually found he wasn’t alone down there. No monsters to speak of yet, but he stumbled upon several rats. They appeared on the other side of the tunnel, across the water, but they moved in the opposite direction as him. They scurried away. They fled. This started with one small group, but the further he walked, the more he saw. After a while, there seemed a steady flow of the rodents, on both the other side of the tunnel and then his own. He moved against them, careful not to crush the little things. Whatever they fled from, he knew that was what he sought.

  Eventually, he passed the hoard of rats and came to an area of relative silence. The noise of the city above had died down, and no longer did its lights illuminate those depths. He had to use a railing to continue forward in that dank dark, but after a ways, a light appeared ahead. This was not the simple light of a candle, however. This roaring fire reflected its light off the gleaming, mossy green bricks. In front of the fire that, despite its intensity, seemed contained, Corrigan saw movement.