Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  I forced my foot down to the next step and shivered as the cold crept another six inches up my leg. Faster—I had to move faster; time was running out.

  Speaking of time, I was supposed to be in Stubbs Hall right now giving an exam on my last three lectures—the final two of which I had failed to show up for. Mark a teaching career as just one more thing in my life that was pretty much over. I stared down into the churning darkness: whatever I had to face down there, it couldn’t be much worse than facing the dean and trying to explain my absences and dereliction of class duties. “Oh y-yeah,” I said, teeth chattering as I stepped down again, “s-sorry D-dr. F. I g-got mixed up in s-some underworld act-t-tivies. N-not m-mafia or organ-n-ized c-crime . . .” I stepped again and the cold pulled at my waist. “ . . . j-just dead g-guys. Y-you know, l-like vampires, z-zombies, c-corporate t-tax attorneys. . . .” I kept forcing myself down, one step at a time until the frigid darkness lapped at my chin. “Oh, f-fu—”

  I submerged.

  Even though I was forcing my way down through preternaturally charged air, the sensation of moving underwater was inescapable. I tried holding my breath but was forced to take in another lungful as I reached the bottom of the stairs. It burned all the way down into my chest, like a shocking first gasp of wintry, arctic air, but seemed to have no further ill effect other than to lower my internal body temperature to match my extremities. In some ways it helped. Like a swimmer who adjusts after that first minute’s shock to the body, I found it easier to move as I acclimated to the temperature around me.

  My vision seemed to improve, as well: the single bulb that lit the stairway’s end glowed feebly in the murk but I could still make out the details in the iron vèvè. The false wall was still open—a testament to another hasty exit. My entrance was a little less hasty.

  The candles that lined the passageway to the hounfort had gone out but tiny red flecks of residual heat still glittered here and there amid the smoking wicks. They guided my way down the corridor like glimmering runway lights in a dense fog. By the time I reached the temple area my chest was laboring like that of a diver who had exhausted himself in swimming against the current.

  The candles upon the altar in the djevo were still burning, but they were not the source of the red and purple lights that bathed the peristil in an eerie glow. A shadow emerged from the silhouette of the poteau mitan: Theresa.

  “So,” she said, “it comes to this.”

  “It comes to what?” I asked carefully. A long machete that had recently adorned the altar was now held loosely in her right hand.

  “A test,” she said.

  “Test?”

  “To see who is worthy to be a Dark Master.” She stepped away from the great pole and tightened her grip on the carved wooden handle.

  “I don’t recall seeing any tests in the Dark Master syllabus,” I said, taking a counter-step to the side.

  “The countess has promised to complete my transformation if I stop you here.” She took another step toward me.

  “Again with the promises,” I said, edging another sideways step and working a gradual curve about the great post. “Remember what I told you about the Countess Báthory’s promises? Well, she’s no longer around to keep or break her word.”

  “You’re lying. I can still hear her voice inside my head.”

  “That’s not—” What? Stop and explain that the countess wasn’t really the countess but the chambermaid?

  Who wasn’t actually the peasant girl Katarina Beneczky but the avatar for something ancient and demonic whose name might be Marinette Bois-Chèche?

  Or, even more likely: Lilith, the Whore of Babylon and the Mother of Demons?

  Aw, the hell with this! I had enough trouble wrapping my own brain around this grotesque game of guess-who. Time was running out and the last thing I needed was Transylvania Barbie here acting out all her dysfunctional relationships with a bigger knife than Rod’s: Bois-Lilith could still have enough time to open the Fifth Seal, red dress or no. “Dammit, Theresa, she’s bad!” I yelled. “She’s bad! You know it . . . you know it!” I hesitated. “Dear God, tell me I didn’t just do a Michael Jackson cover.”

  In response, the machete flicked around and just barely missed my arm.

  I danced back a couple of steps and circled forward again, trying to keep the broad post in the area between us. It wasn’t real shelter but I couldn’t retreat without abandoning my mission. And, under the present circumstances, she might well be able to outrun me.

  “Do you know what your problem is?” she grunted, recovering all too quickly from the wild swing.

  “That I vote for individual candidates and not along party lines?” I couldn’t orbit the pole forever, eventually I was going to get dizzy.

  “You were given an immensely powerful gift and you’ve squandered it.”

  “Why? Because I don’t conform to your idea of a Dark Master? What am I supposed to do? Grind my enemies to dust? Create undead dynasties? Dress like Duran Duran?”

  “Power should never be wasted on those too timid to use it!” she said, swinging for my shins on the word “use.”

  I jumped the blade. “You know the problem with people who crave power is they always want it to rule over others.” I dodged to the other side of the pole. “When the real root of their discontent is their inability to rule over themselves.”

  “If you leave now, she might let you live. She will need a new aristocracy to help her rule and you could be exalted with those of us who are to be her Chosen.”

  “Oooh, chosen! It sounds so special—especially in that ‘help rule the world’ context. Well, I got news for you, Terry-call-me-D-for-Damned: even if your Dark Lady makes Queen For A Day, she’s only offering temp jobs.”

  “Not as temporary as your situation right now!” she grunted, trying a figure-eight pattern of slashes. “And you’d say anything to keep me from killing you now!”

  “I don’t think there’s anything I could say that would keep you from trying.” I dropped to the ground and tried a one-leg sweep. She danced back from the arc of my foot but it threw her off balance.

  “You think I want to kill you?” she panted. “I don’t have a choice!”

  I scrambled back up on my feet as she regained her balance. She swung again, rage and frustration powering the machete with unnatural force and speed. I ducked and leaned back but the tip scored my brow, leaving a burning line of pain across my forehead. The blade met a more solid target at the end of its trajectory, thunking into the wooden pole and burying its tip deep in the reluctant hardwood.

  “You don’t have to kill me,” I remonstrated as she tried to pull the machete free. “You have a choice. You have a lot of choices.”

  “I’m dead!” she shrieked.

  “Everybody dies,” I said. “You’ve still got more options than most.”

  “I am an unnatural creature! I will be hunted! I cannot go out by day! I must ally myself with those who have the power to protect me!” The blade, for all her frenzied tugging, remained resolutely buried in the wood.

  I stepped to the left and extended my hand. “I will protect you.”

  “You?” The offer seemed to enrage her. “How can you protect me when you cannot even use your Dark Gifts to protect yourself?”

  “Ccsssééééjjjtttthhe!” The voice boomed down the corridor and arrived in the temple area like one of the seven trumps of doom.

  As the sound of her new mistress’ voice, Theresa’s eyes grew wide with terror and desperation. Her hands came up, fingers curled like predatory claws. I took a step back to the right, maneuvering the post back between us. Unarmed, she might not be able to kill me but if she could keep me busy until the demoness rode in on Chalice Delacroix, the delay would be just as fatal.

  She shrieked her rage and fear and desperation, launching herself around the great pole. I turned and fled, keeping a tight trajectory around the pole so that I could peel off and head toward the altar. Before I could, however, I
had to duck: the machete remained embedded in the post and cut across my orbital path like a deadly crossing gate. I almost didn’t see it in time and felt a few hairs lag behind as the blade skimmed the back of my head. Behind me, Theresa’s shriek was interrupted by an abrupt “urk!”

  “Ccsssééééjjjtttthhe!!”

  In spite of the approaching sound of the Doomsday Loa, I had to stop and look back. Theresa’s fury had blinded her to the edge-on blade in her path. Her body staggered a few more steps past the machete still embedded in the wood at shoulder height. Black fountains of blood spurted from her neck. Her head rolled on the dark ground beneath the fixed blade. Then her body stumbled and fell. Began to twitch and jerk.

  I turned away. I hadn’t the stomach or the time to watch any more. I ran toward the red-and-purple glow that emanated from the altar.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The glow came from the walls of the djevo.

  The curtains had been pulled aside to reveal shelves built into the three walls surrounding the altar. The shelves were crowded with row upon row of tiny glass bottles: it looked like a liquor cabinet for a 747.

  Except those little liquor bottles the flight attendants dole out don’t glow in the dark while these little containers looked like tiny jars of captured fireflies. Little living pulses of bioluminescence flickered, trapped inside ranks and files of glass prisons.

  Only . . .

  Only they weren’t fireflies . . .

  “Zombis,” I whispered to myself, “zombi astrals!”

  I had come down here looking for shuffling corpses, wondering where Bois-Chèche could hide that many bodies. Now it suddenly made sense.

  The zombi astrals were an efficient way of keeping the Loa as hostages: trap their spirits in a specially prepared bottle and harness their ti-bon-ange as a power source. From the look of things, she had not only trapped the astral forms of the Ogou and Gédé clans, she had hooked these zombie batteries up in a paranormal parallel circuit to augment her own magicks!

  Which meant I was not only on a mission of mercy to rescue the imprisoned Loa, I was sent down here to throw the circuit breaker on Bois-Chèche’s power source. I reached for the nearest bottle and twisted the cap off—or at least I tried to. The cap didn’t twist. It didn’t pull, either. In fact, it didn’t move at all.

  “Ccsssééééjjjttthhe!”

  “Bitch, bitch, bitch . . .” I could hear her approach—she was emerging from the hallway and entering the peristil, now.

  I pulled and twisted harder.

  Nothing.

  I dropped the bottle and grabbed another. It was stuck just as tight. I bounced it off the altar table but it rebounded like shatterproof plastic.

  The machete! I turned and ran toward the pole but Chalice Delacroix’s body was already there, waiting for me.

  “Cséjthe,” she crooned, “you keep running away.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to figure my maneuvering room, “take a hint.”

  “But I don’t want you to run away. I want to be with you. We have so much to offer one another.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the world,” she purred.

  “You mean, what’s left of it after you’re done?”

  “And, of course, there’s this . . .” She ran her left hand over the ripe brown curves of Chalice’s body. The other she kept behind her back. She seemed to get a bigger thrill out of the caress than I might ever hope to.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Who would you like me to be?”

  “I wish you were still Chalice Delacroix.”

  “And so I am.”

  I sighed. “We both know that you’re using her as a meat puppet. The real Chalice Delacroix is not anywhere in the vicinity. Four hundred years ago you pulled the strings in Cachtice castle and laid the blame for your unnatural appetites on Elizabeth Báthory. For a while I thought you might be Katarina Beneczky, but that was probably no more your real name then than Chalice Delacroix is your real name now.”

  “Such a clever boy.”

  I shook my head—and used that gesture to break eye contact for another scan of the room. “Not so clever, really. First I peg you for the true Witch of Cachtice. Then I discover that you are not only not the real Countess Báthory, you’re probably not her undead maidservant, either. Or maybe you’re both—seeing as how you can leapfrog from one person’s body to the next. Did you start out in the countess’ body and then escape to Beneczky’s when the party wound down? Or did you arrive on the scene wearing Katarina’s face and form and pull the strings from the shadows?” Another thought occurred. “Or did you move around, dressing in the bodies of the various servitors in Castle Cachtice?”

  “Castle Cséjthe,” she corrected. “That was so long ago, why does it matter now?”

  “Because I want to know who you really are. Or what? Now I’m supposed to believe that you’re Marinette Bois-Chèche, the Queen Bitch of the Voodoo pantheon.”

  “As I said, such a clever boy!”

  “If I am it’s because I’ve finally figured out that Bois-Chèche is just another mask, too.”

  “Really?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve dropped that particular word from my vocabulary this past year. No, I don’t think you’re Loa, at all. I don’t believe any single Loa has the power—or even the motivation—to imprison all the other Loa and their multiple aspects. Certainly not a lesser aspect like one of the Marinettes. The only thing you have in common with them is your ability to mount a human host and use their body as your own.”

  A thought struck me. “Or maybe you don’t . . .”

  “Maybe I don’t?”

  I tried shuffling a little to the left: I really wanted to know what she was holding behind her back. “The Loa mount living humans to use as their ‘horses.’ Maybe you can’t do that unless they’re dead. More reason to peek behind the mask.”

  “Is my real name so important?” She turned slightly, keeping her right hand obscured.

  “It is if you’re a demon.”

  She laughed. “And knowing my name would give you power over me?” She shook her head. “I have many names!”

  “Trot out the list. I got all night.”

  “Ah, but I do not. Tempus fugit.” She shrugged, her right hand still hidden behind her back. I glanced at the machete still buried in the pole. There was no way to grab it without stepping within her reach.

  Unless . . .

  My right hand twitched and I tried willing the weapon to my hand. Hey, I figured if I could translocate my own body and the ghost of my dead wife was really just the psychokinetic feedback of my own virus-enhanced gray-matter, I should be able to pull the old Luke Skywalker/light-saber/Jedi mind-trick.

  “We have much in common, Christopher.” She took a half-step toward me. “More than you have with any of those others.”

  I shook my head. “You’re not human. I don’t think you ever were,” I elaborated. “As I said, you’ve got the mojo to imprison entire clans of Vodoun spirits and channel their energies to augment your powers. You’ve been around for at least four hundred years and I’m betting even longer than that.” Come to me, I thought at the machete, come to my hand. “Not a problematical lifespan for a vampire and your last vessel seemed to meet all the prerequisites . . . but you change bodies like Bruce Willis changes hairpieces.” Come to me. “And you don’t use blood for physical sustenance. You use it ritualistically and there’s some kind of power connection involved.”

  “There is power in the blood.”

  “Yeah, that’s what everyone says: you, Mama Samm, Dracula, Jimmy Swaggert . . .”

  “Vlad Dracul?” She smiled. “I had heard the stories, of course, but I had not noticed until now.”

  “Noticed what?”

  “How much alike the two of you are.”

  I forgot about the machete for a moment. “Take that back!”

  “Your pride, your arrogance . . .” she sighed, “ . . . that fat
al romantic streak . . .”

  “Fatal . . .” I mused, returning to the subject at hand. I twisted my own hand a little more and fancied I could see the machete quiver a bit. “You waltz into a castle where the mistress is a closet sadist and suddenly there’s a shortage of virgins and a surfeit of blood. If the countess had been half the sorceress she was accused of being, she never would have been caught and imprisoned, much less held until her death. She was your instrument before, during, and even after the trial.”

  She smiled. “Some instruments beg to be played.”

  “Flash forward to now. I don’t know who you were and what you did during the centuries in-between but I bet a little research—” I stopped and cocked my head, the possibilities spinning in my mind like a dark pinwheel. “So what was it like inside Hitler’s bunker?”

  Her mouth made a little moue of a smile. “Not nearly as entertaining as the gas chambers at Birkenau and Majdanek.”

  I was speechless. It’s no secret that the good die young, but I had never really appreciated how evil could live on and on until just this minute.

  “So much death,” she cooed, “so much destruction. I thought that my reign was about to begin.” Her eyes and her mouth softened in fond remembrance. “Hiroshima . . . Nagasaki . . .

  “For ten thousand years I have waited for a lever large enough to unhinge the world. A taste here, a sip there, always waiting for the final feast of souls. I thought the splitting of the atom would open the Fifth Seal. But like every other dark technology, the means always required more pawns than I could co-opt.”

  “Until now,” I said, finally finding my voice. “You are Lilith, Mother of Demons!”

  She laughed. “A fanciful theory for a man who didn’t believe in vampires a year ago and still doesn’t believe in ghosts, even now.”