by Lee Carroll
At the points of the thing’s ears, red snake heads had teeth.
The thing was on him, its webbed hands closing around Will’s throat. Its stocky body weighed enough that the impact when it landed on Will was crushing, nearly asphyxiating him as it almost merged him into the wooden floor. Before he could blink, the venomous fangs were in arteries in his neck, drawing blood out and replacing it with supernatural filth, sending shivers of excruciating pain down through his capillaries and nerve endings. Gasping, Will survived near suffocation, but then he nearly blacked out with revulsion at the thing’s closeness, and his realization that fangs were in him.
He saved consciousness only with a steely determination to kill the swimmer. As to the vilest of blood exchanges, Will had no idea how long it went on, for time seemed both compressed and yet somehow elongated in this hell cell of a room. He could definitely sense that the newlood was ugly and stained. As the writhing eels began to chew at his face, he grew even more enraged. The swimmer was trying to mutilate his features in a way that would match them up with his obscene blood and might also make him hate himself the way the swimmer hated him. Worse, Will saw that the swimmer’s features were becoming more human as he fed—not only more human, but more like Will’s own features! The swimmer was trying to steal his beauty from him along with his humanity!
With this realization, Will suddenly found within himself a vast new strength, one he worried had something to do with the diabolical assault on him, but one he was going to make use of regardless. If it was too late to save his soul, it wasn’t too late to save his appearance. Which, he realized, he might be living with for a long time now. Forever.
Will thrust the half-human, half-reptile vampire upward as if it were made of papier-mâché, red-ribboned saliva dripping from its mouth onto his face as he did so. He gripped it by torso and neck in his newly steely arms and shook it violently back and forth in an effort to break its neck. He could hear by its breath, corrugated as if rough metal rubbed against rust in its throat, that he hadn’t yet. So he bent it over the windowsill and tore its head back until he could hear, with a sound like a log being snapped in two, that he had broken its neck. He flung the carcass out the window. It fell onto the rocks below with an impact that seemed to make the tower shudder. Thunder had stopped and rain was slowing, and any liquid trace of the monster’s existence would dry into extinction by dawn, Will thought with grim satisfaction.
With burgeoning confidence, he turned back to Dee and Roget and began walking slowly toward them. As he approached, though, Dee showed no sign of fear. “This is your immortality, son of the devil Will Hughes,” he cackled, a grin smearing his features. “A vampire’s! Courtesy of one of the most special vampires in the world, Marduk, an esteemed creature whom you’ve seen fit to treat so shabbily. And after the favor he did for you! Shame on you, Hughes. Marduk will be missed—if he is really gone,” Dee added, turning to Roget. “Perhaps you ought to check, mon cher abbé, and see to the horses as well.”
Will thought about trying to stop him, but let him go. His energy should be focused on this other fiend, Dee.
Dee continued lecturing Will. “You’ll live forever of course, as long as you feed on blood at night and avoid the sun at all costs, for sunlight will burn you alive. Now I have a box and ring that will make me ruler of this mortal world, in addition to my occult kingdom.”
Dee must have had a trapdoor of some sort behind the desk, for without another word he snatched the box and the ring and disappeared downward from Will’s sight.
A vampire! Will knew something had gone terribly wrong but … a vampire! In those first shocked instants he failed to think about how limited the places Dee could have escaped to were and let him get away. If Will had dared to think that he himself might have the power to fly, or to glide through the air for distances, he might have exited by the window and caught his tormentor. But he had not even dreamed about such powers yet. He simply wanted his stolen life back—Marguerite as his lover, her properteturn to her—for he knew he had been betrayed by Dee in the most insidious way, which included being tricked into betraying her.
He raced, torn and breathless, bleeding from various wounds, incisors already growing, down the pitch-black, airless stairs. The storm, or Dee in flight, had snuffed out the torchlights. Then Will wandered around the base of the tower, confused, eyes scanning the horizon fruitlessly in every direction. He heard the sound of horses and saw, on the promontory above the beach, the silhouette of a coach racing up the north coast road. Dee had escaped him.
Will felt a tingling in the roots of his incisors and touched those teeth cautiously with his fingertips. He recognized what was happening. “My Lord, I’m a night-sucking freak,” he exclaimed, sinking to his knees in the sand. He raised his face to the sky and let loose an anguished scream, rending his shirt to pieces in his distress. Yet, even at this worst moment of his existence—a wretched existence that would now spin out for centuries—the gift of poetry that his mentor had bequeathed him did not fail him. He felt the words rising up in his throat as if they leaped into being along with his new fangs.
“My day now night, and night now day,
eternity’s my enemy!
Instead of solace, treachery.
Instead of love, blood has its way!
I am transformed to fanged grotesque,
to stalker manic for new blood
to savor, drink, at any risk,
the thrill of veins my only mood.”
When he had finished, he dropped his head … and saw a glint of gold in the sand. Could it be? Will reached down quickly for the metal object, grasping it in a handful of sand as if it alone might save him. Yes, it was! In his flight, Dee had dropped Marguerite’s ring! At least he had the ring back. With this he could try to approach her again! Perhaps she would know of some way to reverse this terrible curse. Or at least her companionship would make his existence bearable.
30
Signal
The trip t
o Pointe du Raz was fairly uneventful. We managed to hire a driver to take us when I balked at Will’s suggestion that I drive the coach. We told the driver that Will was indisposed and needed complete darkness for the duration of the trip. Will gave him the directions he’d written out and impressed upon him the importance of sticking to the route, “even if you’re told the south cliff road is out,” Will insisted. Once we were inside the coach and Will had made sure that the curtains were securely tied over the windows, he retreated to a corner and, drawing his hood low over his face, fell into a sleep t thaso externally resembled death I had to resist the urge to shake him awake.
He could be woken, he told me, but I should only do so in an emergency since he would need all his resources when we reached Pointe du Raz. Since being bored out of my mind in a dark box with a nearly dead man for twelve hours wasn’t an emergency (I tried to read the Brittany guidebook or sketch in my notebook, which were in my backpack, but it was too dark), I let him sleep, but the moment the coach stopped and I smelled ocean, I sprang from its confines as if escaping my own tomb …
… and nearly killed myself by falling over a cliff into the sea. The coach was stopped on a narrow track clinging to the side of a rock cliff.
“Why did you stop here?” I asked in my fractured, modern-day French.
The driver said something completely incomprehensible and jabbed a finger ahead of us. Peering around the front of the coach, I saw what the problem was. A large chunk of the road ahead had crumbled into the sea. Its remnant wasn’t wide enough for the carriage to pass. We’d have to continue on foot—I could see our tower destination below the road, not far off—only Will couldn’t do that until the sun had set.
Shading my eyes, I looked out to sea where a fiery orange sun hung just above an island a few miles offshore. It would set in a half hour or so. We’d just have to wait.
I conveyed this to the surly driver in a combination of hand signs and fractured French that made him sniff wi
th the same disdain I’d encountered in a dozen waiters in Paris. Some things never change, I thought, sitting down on a rock to watch the sun set. As it descended toward the island, it seemed to settle for a moment at the top of a tower that stood at its center. The sight reminded me of something … after a moment I realized what. The ring Will wore—the one he had taken from Marguerite—was engraved with a tower topped by an eye surrounded by rays. I had learned last year that it was the symbol of the Watchtower. Was it a coincidence that the tower on the island looked so much like it?
I took my Brittany guidebook out of my backpack and looked up the Pointe du Raz. The island, I saw right away, was the Île de Sein, which local legend claimed was the last remnant of the mythic island of Ys.
Monsieur Lutin had told me that the fées de la mer—the boat people—came from Ys. Could the tower on the Île de Sein be the original Watchtower?
What happened next suggested to me that it was.
The sun dropped below the peak of the tower, filling its top chamber with orange light. A ray of light, like a flaming arrow, shot out of the tower and headed toward the mainland where I stood—almost directly at me, but not quite. The beam of light reached the next promontory to the north, where another tower stood, and turned the glass on top of that tower a fiery red, so bright I had to close my eyes against the glare.
Behind my closed eyes I still saw the island tower, only the red light in my vision came from a fire burning from its battlements. Out of the fire shot a blazing arrow. I tracked its passage across the sea, across an impossible distance, itogress reflected in the black ocean, until it landed in the tower at Pointe du Raz. Immediately a fire burst into flame from the top of the second tower. Seconds later an arrow was shot from that tower, arcing south toward another promontory. Suddenly I was watching the scene from far above, my vision granting me a bird’s-eye view of the whole peninsula, and I could see the arrow reach a third tower and set ablaze there a third bonfire. I watched as the entire southern coast of Brittany was dotted with blazing signal fires, and then—as my view expanded—I watched the line of fires extend across France, stretching toward Paris. This, I understood, was an ancient alarm system created by the sisterhood of the Watchtower to warn humanity of some coming danger. But what was the danger? What was coming?
I opened my eyes, alert to the threat, but the scene in front of me was utterly peaceful. The ocean had gone eerily still. The last streaks of red were fading into the calm water. A lone figure below on the beach waded through the crimson-flecked waves scooping up handfuls of water like a playful child.
“What an idiot,” a voice behind me pronounced.
I turned and found Will, his face absorbing the last purple vestige of dusk. He was looking down at the figure on the beach with utter disdain. I looked from figure to figure and realized they were the same man.
“I thought that the red light on the water was a sign of my ultimate ascension to immortality. Little did I know what evil was about to come across on that bloody, watery path.”
“The vampire? It came across the sea?”
Will nodded, lifting his eyes from his past self on the beach, who now left the water and began walking toward the tower.
“Marduk.” He pronounced the name in a hoarse whisper that startled me. I’d never seen Will look so afraid of anything before. “A bloodsucking demon from the maws of hell. He terrorized Europe during the Dark Ages, leaving a trail of devastation wherever he went. Eventually the Watchtowers captured him and trapped him beneath their strongest tower—the tower of the Île de Sein. He could only be summoned with the box and the Watchtower’s ring, which I foolishly gave to Dee.”
Will turned and watched his past self enter the tower. “I hesitated at the last minute. I almost didn’t give them to him. If I followed him up into that tower now, I could stop him … me … and I would never become this.”
“But then you and I would never have met,” I said.
He wrenched his eyes away from the tower and looked at me with a bittersweet tenderness. “Would you regret that so very much, Garet? Have I brought you anything but grief and danger since we met?”
“You saved my life from the manticore,” I said, shuddering at the memory of the stone statue that Dee had brought to life. “And later you saved me from Oberon’s spell of paralysis.”
“But if Dee had never gotten possession of the box, he would never have needed you to open it in 2008. You would never have been dragged io this world.”
“If we start messing around with the past, who knows what effect our actions might have. I might never have been born.”
Will touched my face and sighed. “You’re right. We can’t risk making any changes. It’s just … I wish I could erase the evil I’ve done over the last four hundred years. I wish I could come to you cleansed of my sins. As innocent as that man who’s climbing the stairs to the top of the tower right now.”
“The one you just called an idiot?” I asked, moving closer to him. He wrapped his arms around me and I nestled against his chest. He felt as cold as marble. He hadn’t fed since last night in Maeve’s tomb, and he’d need his strength to battle the vampire Dee was summoning.
Just then we heard snores from the direction of the seated driver and glanced up at him, to see that he seemed to have fallen sound asleep. We smiled at each other, and then I curled my hand around the back of Will’s neck and brought his lips down to mine. He kissed me—but guardedly. His whole body was rigid. When I tried to guide his lips to my neck, he pulled back.
“No, Garet, it’s too soon after I fed from you last. You’ll need your strength, too … and besides … we’re out of time. Dee has set the box in the window. Look.”
Will turned me around by the shoulders and pointed me toward the tower. At first I saw nothing but its dark, monolithic shape rising above us. All light had gone out of the sky, but then the moon appeared over the top of the tower, spilling a wash of silver that glinted at the highest window. A ray of silver light burst forth from the window and streaked across the sky toward the Île de Sein. Far off at sea an answering beacon flared, a mirror image of the fiery arrow I’d seen in my vision, only this signal was deathly cold. The flash of light was followed by a long, low moan, like a foghorn … or some ancient leviathan bellowing from the deep.
“The signal from the box has awoken him. He’s coming.”
I stared at the sky, expecting a winged shape, but saw nothing except inky storm clouds massing in the west beyond the lit tower on the Île de Sein. To the east the sky was clear. The moon had now risen high enough to light a silver path across the sea. The ocean, calm a few moments ago, churned. The swath illuminated by the moonlight looked like river rapids.
Then I realized that it was only this part of the ocean that was disturbed. Something was moving through the water. Something either very big or very strong. Or both.
“He’s here.” Will pulled me away from the edge of the cliff and toward the coach. “It’s better if you wait inside the coach. I don’t want you anywhere near that thing.”
But my eyes were glued to the churning surf. Surely nothing in reality could be worse than what my imagination was conjuring from beneath those waves.
I was wrong.
The thing that crawled out of the surf was far worse than anything I could have imagined. The moonlight caught its thousand scales, edging them with razors. When it stood up on webbed feet, seaweed streamed from its limbs like a torn funeral shroud. Only when it began its lumbering slither across the beach did I see that the streamers of seaweed were actually long eels that sprouted from its head. Sharp fangs curled out of its open mouth.
“That creature attacked you and made you a vampire?” I asked as Will pushed me into the coach.
“You thought all vampires looked like the ones in movies?” Will asked, his face set and grim. “That’s the monster that spawned me. It lay beneath the ocean for a thousand years, feeding off the creatures of the deep, its teeth and appetite gro
wing. As he fed from me, he started to look more human—and God knows if I hadn’t killed him, he might have grown human-looking enough to pass among humans again. The thought of drinking that creature’s blood…” A look of revulsion passed across Will’s face. “I don’t want you to see me do it,” he said, looking into my eyes. “Promise me you’ll stay here.”
“But what if you need help—”
He barked a short, mirthless laugh. “With that thing? Please, Garet, just promise me to stay here.”
“Okay, if you promise not to take any unnecessary chances. I want you back.”
He looked at me as if he wasn’t quite sure he believed me, but then he gave my hand a sharp squeeze. “That’s what we both want.” Then he disappeared into the night.
* * *
Will had told me to stay in the coach, but he hadn’t told me not to watch out the window. When I drew back the curtains, I could make out Will’s figure on the edge of the cliff, his face white in the moonlight and his eyes riveted to the tower window. I couldn’t see the tower, but I didn’t have to. I could read the horror going on in there from the expression on Will’s face. How badly he must have wanted to stop it! That was himself—his younger, more innocent self—up there, making the biggest mistake of his life. Given the chance, who wouldn’t take back his worst mistake?
