That’s difficult for even one like me to shrug off. I suppose I looked dead enough for the moment.
I understand that I bled spectacularly.
~ * ~
VIII
And in my dreams, while bone re-formed and flesh knitted, the dreams I never seemed to have during ordinary sleep, because I was too guarded to be bothered by such things as simple regret...
But in my death-dreams I see her again.
It’s been just short of two weeks and yet I’ve forgotten so much about her. But in my dreams I remember what matters most.
She sketches in a piazza, and for as long as I look at her the world seems friendly and promising again. I forget ghosts, I can no longer hear volcanoes. I dismiss every suspicious eye and the fear that narrows them, and I almost feel that I can be better than the thing that I am.
Everywhere she goes, she must carry with her a rare world in which grace is still possible. She looks at smoke but sees clouds. She looks past fallen trees and notices saplings. She holds the sketch pad against her knee and a fat charcoal pencil in her hand; an espresso rests beside her foot. She is the most beautiful creature who’s spoken to me in longer than I can remember.
“Your face ... is so familiar,” she tells me. “I may draw you, yes?”
I let her. She does one sketch, then another. A third and a fourth. I rest between flips of the page, and once I close my eyes and tip back my head and feel the hair spill over my shoulders.
“I have it now!” she cries, and then glances self-consciously about. She hurries closer because she thinks better of speaking too loudly. “Your face... is so like the face on the Shroud. It’s amazing, the resemblance.”
I smile, telling her I’ve heard this before.
Aching so deep inside because I can’t tell her there’s a good reason for the familiarity.
~ * ~
IX
The bodies of political prisoners and religious penitents were rarely given burial, not when there was ample space beneath Rome, in catacombs that had been swallowing bones for centuries. There they would be laid and forgotten, and so was I.
When I awoke to the smell of dust and mould and decay, he was waiting. He turned some anonymous ivory skull in his hands.
“These weren’t my original plans at all, you know. But when you came to Rome... it was impossible to resist,” Vlad said. “I’ve felt your presence passing nearby at least a dozen times over the centuries. Close. But never so close as this time. You can’t have thought you’d walk in and out of my city without meeting again.”
I shook my head. Probably not.
“And you can’t have failed to realize it’s your face on that Shroud of theirs.”
Again, I shook my head. My long-haired, bearded head, growing more recognizable by the day.
“Then you wanted this, Hugh. You wanted it. I have the power to grant it. The Shroud has been locked away at Turin for many years. But I own the keys now.”
“I think you want it more than I do,” I said.
“Of course. I love the Church, but I’m not above destroying it completely. Which may happen, when people realize what we’ve done, who they’ll think we’ve put to death. I’ll take that chance. Your first public act can be forgiving your executioners. Or, instead of peace, you can bring a sword—as I said, I don’t need the cardinals any more, now that I have you.
“Either way, I’m giving the world something the Church never managed. Something it’s been promised for two thousand years. That should give my cattle enough to rally around, to survive the next few years. If they’ve lost faith in themselves, then perhaps the sight of you, and the news of your resurrection, will be enough to restore it.”
“Your cattle?” I whispered. “You still don’t care any more for them than that?”
“Why should I? It’s an old principle, played out in nature countless times. If the deer die off, the wolves starve. Beyond that, what else is there for me to care about?”
I tried to sit up, naked and sore and scabbed in this newest burial rag. “You really are the Devil, aren’t you?”
He extended his hand. “So pleased to make your acquaintance, after all this time.”
I took it, because what else could I do, too stiff to haul myself off that rough stone slab. Vlad steadied me on my feet.
“Just remember,” he warned me. “You may be God incarnate. But you’re still in my hands.”
He led me past the more fortunate dead, to the steps that would take us back up to the daylight world of affliction and need.
<
~ * ~
PETER CROWTHER
The Last Vampire
PETER CROWTHER is the recipient of numerous awards for his writing, his editing and, as publisher, for the hugely successful PS Publishing imprint.
As well as being widely translated, his short stories have been adapted for TV on both sides of the Atlantic and collected in The Longest Single Note, Lonesome Roads, Songs of Leaving, Cold Comforts, The Spaces Between the Lines, The Land at the End of the Working Day and the upcoming Things I Didn’t Know My Father Knew.
He is the co-author (with James Lovegrove) of Escardy Gap and author of the Forever Twilight SF/horror cycle (Darkness Darkness, Windows to the Soul and Darkness Rising) and the Hallowe’en novel By Wizard Oak and Fairy Stream.
He lives and works with his wife and business partner, Nicky, on the Yorkshire coast.
When the Post Apocalyptic Shadow Show rolls into town, the last thing anyone expects to meet is a vampire ...
~ * ~
THE SOUND OF air horns cut through the early evening, two deep harrrnkkk dispelling the stillness and, albeit for only a moment, frightening the crickets into a stunned silence.
Billy Kendow had his bedroom windows opened wide, feeling the pleasant cool air drifting through with smells of night-time undergrowth and rain-soaked foliage. He looked across and, just for a second, half expected to see the red-nosed clown out of his old reading book, waving a klaxon horn and shouting to him
put down that rabbit, boy and roll up, roll up why dontcha for the show that never ends
but there was only the night and the darkness. Maybe he had imagined it. But then, there it went again, harrrnk!, harrrnk!, echoing across the fields. Then two more, the first one sounding momentarily farther away and then, with the second, nearer. Not a lot nearer, but definitely nearer.
“Ma!” Billy shouted, eyes staring wide at the window, picturing the highway across the fields. “Didja hear that?”
“I sure did.” His mother’s voice sounded tired, kind of uninterested. “Just a truck, honey. Nothing to get too excited about. Tom Duffy’ll’ve heard it. No need for excitement.”
But no, there was a need. Those air horns signified more than just some dumb old truck-driver finding a tattered and mildewed map and taking the dog’s leg short-cut across from the crater-marked 124 onto US64, which, so other people aiming to pass through Pump Handle had often said, seemed to have withstood the worst of the bomb storm.
Bomb storm.
Seemed to Billy like a funny thing to say, but that was what it had been like. Even he could remember it, and he had only been around two, three years old. Just bombs falling like rain, silver needles dropping out of the sky and turning everything on the ground to mush ... the way—or so his mom always told everyone—that Billy himself used to turn his supper of grits and potatoes and vegetables and meat into a thickly textured goo of no distinct colour. Only a wash of browns and whites and greens, each one taking on some of the characteristics of the one next to it.
It had been a long time since they’d had those suppers, Billy thought now. A long time since anyone in town had even seen an outsider. But the sound of the truck horns—it had to be truck horns—suggested that people were here again. And more people than just one truck. It was more than that. It had to be. Those harrrnkh were exclamations, promises of life and of survival, proud cries of here we are, come see us... and there wer
e surely more than one. And it had been so long since anyone had passed through Pump Handle ...
“Maybe they’re bringing us food and provisions ... real food ... and—” He quickly scrolled through his head at the other things he hoped such mythical cargoes might contain. His eyes lit up. “—and comicbooks, ma ... maybe they’ll bring us comicbooks.”
“Trucks wouldn’t be stopping here, Billy, leastwise not of their own accord. Ain’t no provisions delivered any more,” she said, “and there ain’t nothing to stop here for, more’s the pity.” There was a clanking sound from the kitchen as Billy’s mother shouted, “And there ain’t no comicbooks, Billy. You know that. Not since the war.”
Billy carefully returned the rabbit he had been playing with to the small cage on the makeshift table at the foot of his bed, walked across to the window and stepped out onto the flat-boarded roof section. Breathing in the night smells of jasmine and hollyhock, he looked to the sky. Way off to the west, over towards Memphis maybe, the sky was black and threatening rain. But here, the air smelled good, clean and fresh and full of opportunities.
It even felt different somehow ... expectant, maybe. He sniffed the breeze and breathed in the aroma of the plants and the soil and the grasses and the trees. Even that composite smell felt excited, somehow ... the way Billy was feeling himself. He threw his head back and smiled at the starry sky.
Something was coming. Something was coming tonight.
He grasped the balcony rail outside his window. “I’m going out, Ma,” he shouted. “Going out to see what it is.” And with a single leap, he was down on the ground and running across the grass, his mother’s voice drifting behind him but unable to catch him up, running fit to burst towards the spiralling funnels of light that twisted and turned into the night sky as whatever was coming weaved their way around the perilous bends of Jesmond Hill.
At the stile at the edge of the field that gave onto the blacktop, Billy stopped and leaned on the fence. Two uprights to his left, the fence had long ago disintegrated and rotted into the thick mulshy weed that made up the field. He didn’t need to cross the stile to get onto the blacktop but it felt right... felt like the way it must have felt all those years ago before the bomb storm.
Billy looked left along the road leading into town. Alongside the road, he could see the silent shapes of other townsfolk making their way towards him. Over to the right, he could hear the faint drone of motors getting louder and, mixed in amongst it, there was music. Billy laughed and slapped his thigh. “Hot dog!” he shouted to the uncaring night. This was really turning out to be something, wasn’t it? Real trucks were coming to town. And, from the sound of them, they were going to be a whole heap of fun.
When the first one edged around the final section of Jesmond Hill, onto the straight that led directly into Jingle Bend and then town and then right out again about a minute later, Billy climbed onto the stile and started waving his arms about his head, whooping for all he was worth. First up came a flapping tarpaulin, then came the polished black of the cab, then the windshield, then the hood, the grill and, at last, there it was in all of its dusty buckled splendour.
It spoke of far-off places and untold adventures; it smelled of prairie campfires and coloured rain; and it looked like a slant-eyed beast from his brother’s stories, whispered long ago late at night when pain kept sleep at bay. It might have seen better days, this ‘gleaming carriage of excitement’, but to Billy it was just the finest collection of sights and sounds and smells that he had ever seen in the whole of his short life.
Billy had been still all but toddling when the first bombs were dropped, China holding good its promise to deal straight with the aggression shown it by the US. And there were the Iraqis and the Iranians and the Turks and…
... and every other power-mad asshole with strength or inclination enough to draw breath and pass wind ...
his father had said to him on one of those long-since endless nights of swirling smoke and constant thunder.
Both of which amounts to the same, young Billy,
he had continued,
‘ceptin’ the one smells a sight worse than the other.
Strategic exchanges had followed in quick succession. Billy’s brother, Troy, had told him night-time stories about England and the whole of what Troy called ‘the British Islands’ being sunk, about Europe being devastated—first by chemical bombs and finally by 200-mile-an-hour dust storms—and about how mainland USA (which was where Troy and Billy and his folks lived, Troy had said) was now a wilderness of broken buildings and city-sized potholes, and mile after mile of the strange coloured vegetation that had sprung up long after the final dust clouds had settled down and the smells of explosive and burned flesh had all but drifted away completely.
Troy had told Billy, late at night when they were lying in their cots staring out at the stars, that they’d come out of it better than most. Troy said he and their daddy had stood and watched the cloud rise from the first bomb, a beautiful pear-shaped swirl shot through with every colour in the rainbow, shimmering brightly ...
But Troy was gone, now. Daddy, too.
For a moment, Billy had felt a profound sadness, a bone-numbing hollowness that seemed to burn at the back of his throat, but it disappeared as soon as it had shown itself. It disappeared with the first of the trucks, pulling along the dusty road, throwing up all kinds of grit and dirt and soil behind them. Billy thumped a clenched fist into the palm of his other hand. “Hot dog!” he shouted, trying to get his voice above the sound of the straining motors and the pulsating music, loud thumping rhythms that made him want to shuck and jive his feet, made him want to cartwheel along the roadside, made him want to jerk his head so hard it would almost fall right off his neck...
This music, the sounds of it filled the whole of the road, maybe they filled the whole of what used to be the county ... hell, maybe it filled the whole world, drifting on the poisonous winds forever, fading maybe, getting softer and softer as it travelled, but always there. Always existing.
Why, not too long ago, a wild-eyed drifter—sporting enough burns to have fried any normal man into a blackened stump—had come into town with a bottle he’d found amidst the rubble of a place called Chicago. The bottle was covered with a thick gauze tied around with frayed string. Billy had asked what was in there and the man had told him
the sounds of the last day of the world, my friend
and then he had laughed loud and long, his mouth hanging wide and gums dripping yellow pus onto his tongue.
When the man had carefully removed the top from the jar, Billy had heard a hundred voices—no, maybe a thousand or a million or even a thousand million voices—all crying out in agony. He had run then, run away from the wild-eyed man, trying to drown out the despair of those cries ... trying to drown out the sound of the man laughing again, laughing for all he was worth as he placed the gauze around the jar once more.
No sound ever dies, the man had called after him, particularly the sound of death itself.
Moonlight glinted off the dusty black carapace of the first truck as it pulled up alongside Billy Kendow, suddenly jolting him back to the present. Eyes wide, mouth wide, senses wide open and shouting feed me! for all they were worth, Billy stared up at the cab and came face to face with a man chewing on a smouldering cigar.
The truck came to a stop right in front of Billy, its air brakes hissing and whining, and the man leaned out of his open window and looked at Billy. Then he looked around, up the road ahead and back over behind Billy, back across the fields to Billy’s house. “Where the hell are we, boy?” He waved an old, torn map at Billy and then threw it to the floor of the cab. “Map shows dots of towns on it but no names to speak of.”
“Pump Handle, sir,” Billy exclaimed, trying to imbue the words with some kind of significance. Like it was Valhalla or Bethlehem instead of a run-down collection of shanty houses that would have been perfectly at home getting on for a century ago in the dust-blown cardboard cities of
the Oklahoma flatlands.
He pointed ahead along the road. “Up ahead a half mile or so. But there’s trees and stuff all across the road at Jingle Bend ... might need some help in moving them before you can make any headway.”
The man nodded. “Sounds good to me.” He looked aside to a scrawny and pale-looking woman sitting beside him. “Sound good to you, Deedee?”
The woman stretched her arms out in front of her and yawned fit to split her face wide open. “Anything gets me outta this goddam truck sounds good to me.”
“That settles it,” the man said to Billy. “Looks like we set up here.”
“Set up?” Billy felt his heart skip a beat.
“Sure.” The man jerked a thumb back behind him. “The Post Apocalyptic Shadow Show? Don’t you read?”
The Mammoth Book of Dracula - [Anthology] Page 66
