Vigil

by Saunders, Craig

  Copyright © Craig Saunders 2012

  All rights pertaining to this work retained by Craig Saunders and Craig R. Saunders Publications.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Vigil

  by

  C. R. Saunders

  *Note: This novel also contains bonus material - a sneak preview of Richard Rhys Jones' The Division of the Damned*

  Also by Craig Saunders:

  Novels

  The Estate

  A Home by the Sea

  Rain

  The Noose and Gibbet

  A Stranger's Grave

  The Love of the Dead

  Spiggot

  The Seven Point Star

  The Gold Ring

  Novellas

  Deadlift

  Scarecrow – Scarecrow by Craig Saunders and The Madness by Robert Essig

  The Walls of Madness

  The Dead Boy: A Dead Days Novella (# 1)

  Short Story Collections

  Dead in the Trunk

  The Black and White Box

  Dark Words and Black Deeds

  Writing as C. R. Saunders:

  The Evolution War

  Vigil

  Writing as Craig R. Saunders:

  The Outlaw King (The Line of Kings Trilogy Book One)

  The Thief King (The Line of Kings Trilogy Book Two)

  The Queen of Thieves (The Line of Kings Trilogy Book Three)

  Rythe Awakes (The Rythe Trilogy Book One)

  The Tides of Rythe (The Rythe Trilogy Book Two)

  Coming Soon:

  The Setting Sky

  Masters of Blood and Bone

  Bloodeye

  Flesh and Coin

  731

  Rythe Falls (Rythe Trilogy Book Three/Part I. and Part II.)

  Praise for Craig Saunders:

  [A Home by the Sea] 'Brutal and Poetic' - Bill Hussey, Author of Through a Glass, Darkly and The Absence

  [Rain] 'I'd say it's the best book I've read in a year.' - The Horror Zine

  'Saunders brings the unthinkable to life with pure visual perfection.' Emma Audsley, the Horrifically Horrifying Horror Blog

  'Stephen King with a touch of Cardiff dirt and a lot of London grime.' - Richard Rhys Jones, author of 'The Division of the Damned'.

  [Spiggot] 'Incredibly tasteless, shamelessly lowbrow, and very, very funny!' - Jeff Strand, author of Lost Homicidal Maniac (Answers to "Shirley")

  "With A Stranger's Grave, Saunders has written a truly dark, atmospheric and character driven tale, packed with page-turning mystery, sorrow, and a jaw-dropping reveal that will leave readers haunted long after they've gone to bed." --David Bernstein, author of Machines of the Dead and Amongst the Dead

  'A talent to keep an eye on.' - Eric S Brown, author of Bigfoot War

  "A top-notch, thrilling read. Craig Saunders is a master of the genre." Iain Rob Wright author of Animal Kingdom and Final Winter

  'An awesome talent!' - Ian Woodhead: Author of Shades of Green and Infected Bodies

  “The Love of the Dead starts out like the type of horror novel you think you’ve read before, then whacks you over the head and goes in a direction you didn’t see coming—think chainsaws at a daycare center. Saunders’ writing will creep into your spine and paralyze you with dread.” —David Bernstein, author of Amongst the Dead and Tears of No Return

  [The Love of the Dead] 'Craig Saunders' unique chiller kept my eyes glued to the pages in anticipation.' - Kenneth W. Cain, author of These Tresspasses

  Acknowledgment

  First of all, I'd like to note that I have taken huge, towering liberties with history, science, culture...well, everything, throughout this novel. It is entirely intentional, and nobody's fault but mine.

  Secondly, as always, this is for Sim.

  He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am.

  The Gospel of Thomas

  The Parisian Countryside

  2025 A.D.

  Year Zero: Apocalypse

  A cold wind blows in from the west. It blows from the English Channel, across ploughed fields and through the city. It carries the sea and a feel of the French countryside, fragrant brown earth and bitter stones. It brings with it all the tastes and smells and textures of the world that was. But also, in that gusting, chill wind, a taste of things to come.

  Fire and blood and black rain.

  A chateau stands in the last gasp of sunset. It sprawls across the landscape. Two floors of white walls. Leaded windows in dark wood frames. The first floor is hidden behind a long expanse of wall, as white as the house. The outside of the wall has been cleared of brush and grass and trees. The surrounding countryside is flat and bare.

  In the distance behind the house the lights of the closest village brighten against the rising night.

  A man, dishevelled, stands before the gates. His head is poised, his legs slightly bent, like he’s prepared to run. He turns his head toward the night that rises from the east. The chateau’s white walls take on the fading glow of the setting sun, the colour of sullied gold then the illusion passes and the man is left standing before gates held fast only by a ghostly wall rising from the black earth. Nothing gold remains.

  The man’s face is a map of scars, each line a road drawn from pain. His features are still clear despite the scarring. His nose is long and noble. His cheeks are just slashes of bone, pushing against pale skin. He looks as though he has never eaten, and if he did, it was so long ago that his body has forgotten the taste of food.

  A fierce light burns in his dark eyes. They twinkle and darkle as the light laces through their deep shadowy sockets.

  He doesn’t feel the bitter cold seeping from the earth. His feet are muddy, leading to pale white flesh of an unclad ankle, scars visible even there, ghostly in the dusk’s late light. His trousers are torn.

  He takes a deep breath, like a man getting ready for a hard and dirty task. Favouring his left leg noticeably, the limp doesn’t stop him leaping to the top of the wall and balancing there like a bird perched on a telephone wire.

  He listens to heavy-booted footfalls and an accompanying clack-clack-clack of a dog’s nails on the paving surrounding the chateau. The last of the light fades outside the walls, but inside the artificial glow of security lights set around the chateau light every dark corner in their unforgiving glare. But this section of the wall is in darkness. It is a long time since he was last here, but he remembers it well enough.

  Silently, the man pulls his long coat around him to stop it flapping in the cold wind.

  A guard and a dog on a leash round the corner, walking calmly. The guard wears a stab vest, blue in the hard lights. He carries a baton but the dog is the only weapon he needs.

  The guard is ignorant of the intruder. Then the man drops on him from above. With a hand held like a claw and power unhinted at in his narrow shoulders, he swipes the guard’s throat and tears through the windpipe. The guard’s scream whistles, the sound blanketed with blood.

  Before the man can silence the dog in the same way, it snarls and takes a lump of flesh from his arm along with some of the threadbare coat. The man in the dark coat drops to one knee, bringing the dog down with him, and sinks his teeth into the dog’s neck. He rips fur and spine free with his teeth and spits. It is the first sound he has made. The grimace he makes is for the taste of the dog, not the pain.

  The dog’s grip does not slacken. The man pries the dead jaws from his forearm without complaint.

  Now the risk of discovery is greater. He is bathed in light.

  Time began with that first impotent cry from the guard’s burbling throat. The man in the coat breaks into a run, limp barely evident now, and lowers his shoulder. He crashes through the doo
r to the guard house. The second guard, far too slow, leaps from his seat and tries to reach a gun by his side, but the scarred man is faster. Much faster.

  Time is still running down, but slower now. Both guards are dead and silent. Two nurses and the housekeeper wait inside the house. No alarm has been sounded.

  He punches a hole in the front door, two inches of hard wood, reaches through and turns the latch.

  Too much noise. Move. Faster. There’s an alarm in the kitchen, and one in the master bedroom.

  But it’s quiet, and he’s close enough. He runs.

  The hallway is empty. A twin staircase leads to the second floor. Nothing’s changed. Of course not. How could it?

  The nurses would be staying on the second floor, but the housekeeper would be on the first floor.

  The house is large but the intruder’s hearing is astounding. He hears the flush of a toilet down a long corridor and turns toward it at a flat run. He should make a sound. There should be a slapping with a hint of squeak. The floor is slate, his feet bare, but he’s silent, a ghost. Eerily, on soundless feet, his loping gait takes him down the corridor. As he runs his limp is gone and suddenly he is in perfect balance, strength evident in every stride. Still, some sense makes the housekeeper turn toward him as he flies toward her, but without a cry she falls.

  Upstairs the nurses are in conversation. It doesn’t matter now. There is no one left to hear them scream, no alarm in this lounge on the landing of the second floor. The chance of failure has passed. Time slows yet again.

  The second nurse has time to plead but it’s too late by then.

  Then there were just two left in the chateau.

  He walks along the hall. The bedroom is at the end. Hissing breath comes from behind the door, punctuated by a gentle beep, beating out time with a heart. The heart he can almost hear from within the room.

  He pushes the door open and walks into the room.

  A man lies on the bed. He’s old, perhaps as old as time. His skin is paper-thin. Waxy. A thin sheen of sweat stands out on a febrile brow. Wisps of hair float in the breeze coming through an open window. Liver spots stand proud on his forehead and scalp. His eyes are closed, but the man in the long coat imagines they will be cold and calculating, rivers of red capillaries running through them. Intelligent eyes, if rheumy.

  The man in the coat turns and looks toward the far wall. There is a picture of a woman there in a gilded frame. He approaches it, the man behind him forgotten.

  He stares at the picture for a long time. He remembers.

  He checks the clock in his head and turns to the west facing window.

  The machine beeps.

  The sky brightens suddenly, impossibly bright, and he has to shield his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again the white light is gone, replaced by a glow that is as beautiful as a sunrise. The sunrise of a new dawn. A new age.

  Beep.

  Tick.

  A fierce wind blows hard and hot even this far from Paris. When it finally stills the digital clock on the nightstand bleeps once and dies. The heart monitor fails, too, but the old man’s chest continues to rise and fall.

  In the depths of this darkest winter, 2025, true night arrives. There are no lights burning between the chateau and Paris. The only light is the raging, nuclear fire.

  The ashes of mankind’s reign on earth begin to fall, and by the light of that distant fire the vigil begins.

  *

  Part One

  The Hunger

  Chapter One

  Romania

  Base of the Carpathian Mountains

  c. 1362 A.D.

  Pain was the first word. Hunger was the second.

  Awake, the pain was fierce. It was filed to the finest point, honed sharper than a razor blade. The pain was studded boots on shards of glass driven through bone and gristle. Sanded and abraded skin drowned in whisky and daubed with salt. Every inch of flesh screamed and every bone pounded. My head thrummed and danced a dervish while a horned Satyr fucked my brain raw.

  That was the first. My birth was into blood. As a babe, the pain came first. As a man the hunger came second.

  I hunger now and forever. The pain is nothing compared to the hunger. Even through the pouring blood and the knowledge, the surety, that my life bled and my bones crumbled as I hungered…the hunger ruled.

  The pain let me know I was alive. The hunger told me if I did not eat I would die.

  My first cry, a scream, then, nothing.

  Was it sleep? I don’t think it was. It think it was hibernation. Becoming anew. Leaving the old behind. My body healed while I was under a blanket of stars, unaware of this fresh beauty above me. I wasn’t a creature made for beauty. I was a creature born of pain, not poetry.

  So, in passing into life bloodied and broken, torn and sullied, my mind raped by something unknown, I was born a babe in a man’s mind. I had no words but a thousand feelings and thoughts I had no name for, save two.

  As the night passed, the pain from my body and limbs faded. It faded as much as the distance between my eyes and the stars now…closed…to now. But that special pain, the one inside, was growing. The everything pain. The pain that had a name of its own. Hunger.

  I opened my eyes to a new night. In this one there was a scimitar blade of light at the limit of my vision, a Moorish moon brightening the sky. The cold clean light hurt my eyes.

  I closed them. Opened them. Everything was red. I discovered I could blink. I could feel arms, legs, chest…the parts that make the image of a man.

  I could not move the man, though, nor my head to see. I blinked and cleared the red with my eyelids. Black swam into the void. But it wasn’t complete.

  My blood pounded in my head and heart, a torrent growing in my veins. The red came back for just a moment and so I found my anger.

  Stars.

  The words were falling into place now. The words of my life.

  Darkness. Light.

  Sky. Space. Suns. Night. Moon.

  It was night and they were stars. Distant stars. This concept was immense, powerful, overwhelming. I reached out to touch them but I couldn’t move my arm. They were so far away. So beautiful. Glittering promises in the night sky.

  Sorrow. This was new. The rush of discovery brought joy.

  And in this way I was born. Is this the way all men are born? Through discovery?

  I was a creature, I told myself, made of bone and muscle and breath and blood. But not just that. I was made of words and sorrow and joy and anger and pain.

  But most of all I was made of hunger.

  *

  Chapter Two

  Romania

  Base of the Carpathian Mountains

  I lay that way for a many days. I think it was weeks. I learned all I could from my memory but my purpose and my life. I understood that I was not a baby, though my mind could not understand why I could not speak the words I knew.

  The pain was a constant companion but it no longer troubled me. It was the hunger that hurt the most.

  Then I felt something new. A sharp prod in my stomach. I couldn’t move to push it away or scratch at it. It was irritating. It came again and again. Insistent and annoying.

  ‘You dead?’

  So this was words spoken. Why did I not understand them? They were not in my head.

  ‘Shh. Call papa. He’s dead.’

  A childish voice, not yet broken, but unmistakably a boy. I didn’t understand the words.

  The one poking me did not give up so easily. He prodded and prodded. I wanted to take the stick away from that voice.

  I couldn’t move. But my eyelids could open.

  I opened my eyes. The voice screamed. This I thought I understood. It was a scream of pain.

  No. The tremor was different. This was a scream of fear.

  He ran. I was pleased with myself. It was just me and my pain and my hunger and my words. I closed my eyes once again and slept for a time, then I was being lifted onto a bier. This is an old wo
rd. I wasn’t sure it was what I was searching for. I thought a bier might be for a corpse. I wasn’t a corpse. I was breathing. I could move my eyelids.

  Like this. Open.

  Two men jumped and dropped me to the ground. I felt my skull pound against hard earth and something jarred inside. I thought about screaming, but then I was in the sleep that was not sleep but was not death.

  *

  Chapter Three

  Romania

  Base of Carpathian Mountains

  When I next opened my eyes I made sure it was safe. I cracked them open slowly and looked around. I was in a small room. I could see the roof. Timber beams crossed the ceiling. Above them the apex. The roof looked to be made from some kind of straw, interwoven, forming a barrier which kept out the sky and the stars. I didn’t like it much. There was something beautiful about the stars, but this wasn’t beautiful. This was scared. They kept the stars out because of the sorrow. But I liked the sorrow. It was a feeling, a pure feeling. It was good.

  This roof was brown. It was low. If I climbed on the beams crisscrossing the ceiling I could touch it. There was no mystery. There was no sorrow.

  Someone had covered me in a sheet. When I opened my eyelids now there was no red mist covering my vision but the timber beams and the straw roof were murky, seen through the sheet that covered my eyes. The sheet and the beams and the straw that shut out the stars and the night.

  But there is light to see well enough. A candle on a table out of sight.

  And a woman. A woman sitting, I presumed. She was eye-level with me and holding beads in her hand. She was praying. Praying to God.

  I did not understand her words. She spoke quickly, it seemed to me, and try as I might to grasp the meaning of her words they flitted out of reach as they sped from her mouth. The candle flickered slowly and her words spun forth, words I could not understand.