Eldren: The Book of the Dark

by William Meikle

  They hadn’t heard any sound for several minutes, either from the church or from the graveyard outside. Margaret was worried, and her body was psyched up for flight but she tried not to let any tremor escape in her voice as she spoke.

  “I’ll go and see what’s happened to them,” she said with more bravery than she felt, pushing herself off the chair at the same time. It took more effort than she hoped, and she only just managed to stand upright. It seemed that all her blood had suddenly rushed to her head and the room threatened to spin…first left, then right. She had to force her legs to lock out, otherwise her knees would have buckled, and if she fell back in the chair again she wouldn’t get out of it for a long time.

  She felt a small hand press itself into her good one and she looked down to see Tony looking up at her.

  “I’m coming with you,” he said. She saw the determination in his young face. The knuckles of his other hand were white where they gripped the poker.

  “Okay,” she said. She was too tired to argue and in truth she felt grateful for the company...even if it was only a boy.

  She could walk...easier than she would have thought possible, and by the time she got out of the room and out in the hall she felt almost human.

  She opened the front door gingerly, half expecting to be attacked as soon as she stepped outside. She was surprised to see that the sky was a wash of pink and that far off to her left the sun was already half way over the horizon.

  “Bill?” She shouted. “What’s going on?”

  Her voice carried far in the still morning and a small flight of crows dispatched themselves from the trees in the churchyard, but there was no other answer.

  The church door was half-open and she approached it slowly. Tony gripped her hand tightly as she swung the door full open and stared into the darkness of the church.

  “Don’t go in,” he said. “Please don’t. Something bad has happened.”

  She gave him an answering squeeze.

  “We’ve got to,” she said. “I’ve run away from too much already...it’s time I faced up to it.”

  She stood there for long seconds, letting her eyes get accustomed to the gloom before stepping over the threshold.

  “Bill?” she called again.

  She grimaced as her voice echoed back at her.

  The church was quiet, but there was something about the silence that made her think that a great deal of activity had just taken place, noise and movement and, yes, violence, that had been cut short as soon as she’d called.

  She remembered feeling the same thing once before, at the scene of a car crash, just seconds after an accident, that quiet stillness, like a pause between events, a time when you were waiting to see what happened next.

  She stepped further into the church and her foot hit something that slid noisily away from her. She looked down.

  Psalm books and hymnals were strewn over the floor, and as her eyes became fully adjusted she could see other, larger shapes in the shadows.

  The church pews had been overturned and pushed out of their regular rows into a hotchpotch disarray and the font had been knocked over, the water slowly spreading among the scattered paper. The pulpit leaned at an angle, looking like it was ready to fall over at any minute, and several of the huge organ pipes and been bent and twisted out of line.

  “Hello?” she said, but she didn’t want to raise her voice to more than a loud whisper.

  “There’s nobody here,” Tony whispered. “Come on. Let’s get out. I don’t like it here.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like a church anymore.”

  They walked out of the church backwards, keeping their eyes on the shadows, but there was no movement, no sound. Margaret’s spine crawled, and she was convinced that there was something waiting in the shadows by the door...something with bloodied fangs that would pounce just when they relaxed.

  She tensed as they approached the door, but there was nothing there but shadows. She closed the door quietly behind them as they left.

  The sky was brighter now, and it looked like it would be a fine morning, but Margaret had a chill inside her that no end of sun would dispel.

  When she turned away from the church she noticed for the first time the brightly colored ribbon that marked the police scene of a crime.

  “The policeman and Bill Reid, both gone?” she muttered. She took a step forward, at the same time as Tony let go of her hand.

  “The old man,” he said, “He’s over there.”

  He pointed with the poker, and Margaret saw the metal bar tremble violently before the boy lowered it to his side.

  She bent down to look him in the eye.

  “Listen...I’m just going to have a look...just to see if the others are over that way. You stay here and don’t move. Okay?”

  The boy nodded, his grip on the poker tightening even further.

  “And shout, loud, if anything happens,” Margaret said.

  She didn’t want to go anywhere near any body...particularly one of someone she knew, but there was something she had to do if she was to make herself believe in all that was happening.

  She stepped nimbly over the gaudy tape and approached the amorphous tarpaulin on the ground. She had one look back at Tony but the boy was standing in the doorway of the Manse, his gaze fixed hard on the door of the church.

  A large stone at each corner steadied the tarpaulin. She moved one aside and lifted up the edge of the sheet, drawing it back from the body.

  Old Sandy looked like he hadn’t died easy, and Margaret felt gorge rise in her throat as she looked at the crossbow bolt protruding from his chest and the massive, gaping bloodless, wound at his neck. She didn’t realize that she was rubbing hard at the bandage on her wrist, hard enough for a spreading patch of red to form just beneath the knuckle.

  She bent over the body and grabbed hold of the quarrel, just beneath the feathers.

  “I have to know,” she whispered to herself. “I have to.”

  She closed her eyes and started to pull.

  At first she thought that she wasn’t going to able to move the bolt, then it started to give, slowly at first, grating against a rib as it came, inch by inch.

  She stopped, suddenly dizzy, and breathed gulps of air deep into her lungs.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she whispered to herself. Things had taken a turn into the Twilight Zone again. She was about to interfere with the scene of a murder, just to verify whether vampires existed or not.

  She stood over the body, and for a second considered leaving it be...just replacing the tarpaulin and walking away. But then she might never know. She bent down to the body once more, gave one last yank on the bolt and suddenly it was free.

  Margaret held her breath, studying the old man’s face, but there was no movement. She considered drawing back his lips to check his teeth, but that way lay madness.

  She dropped the quarrel on the ground by the body and turned towards the Manse. Tension drained out of her.

  Too much stress and strain, she said to herself. And not enough sleep.

  She was about to call out to Tony when there was a cough behind her, and she turned back just in time to see Old Sandy sit up and spit a garlic clove from his mouth.

  Thin tendrils of smoke rose like mist from his face and hands. He opened his mouth to scream and only smoke came out...thick, black, greasy smoke that caught in the back of Margaret’s throat and made her gag violently.

  The old man’s eyes snapped open, and he looked straight at Margaret. He reached out his arms towards her, whether in attack or in a plea for comfort she would never know as the rising smoke got thicker and blue flame burst over the body, a flame so hot that Margaret had to step back as the skin of her face tightened.

  The body on the ground thrashed, left and right, heels drumming on the ground and suddenly withered hands clutched frantically at the air as the flame spread and the flesh began to spit and hiss, like a basted chicken on a barbecue sp
it.

  It was over in seconds.

  For the space of one heartbeat she could still distinguish the old man in the flame. But then he fell apart, like a collapsing bonfire, until all that was left was the burning remnants of his clothes and the thick black smoke already dispersing in the light morning breeze.

  Margaret bent double and threw up several large whiskies on the grass at her feet.

  ~-o0O0o-~

  Brian sat upright in the bathtub.

  Deep in the pit of his stomach a fire raged, a cold fire that demanded attention. He felt it as a hunger, so deep he knew he would starve if it weren’t assuaged.

  He stood and stepped out of the tub, studying the sleeping form on the floor. The man had an aura...an emerald and gold glow that stood out for more than three inches all around his body, an aura that pulsed and flowed in time with the man’s deep breathing. And down inside that aura Brian could smell something that threatened to drive him mad. He knew it would be red, and hot, and that it would quell the hunger inside him.

  He had been transported into a nightmare, one from which there was no return.

  His memory of the past hours was hazy. He remembered the meal with Margaret, and he remembered being driven here by the tall man with the expensive car, but the rest of the night was blurred and confused, like a half remembered dream.

  And the man’s stories made little sense...full of barbarous sounding names and hints of ancient evils...raising more questions than answers.

  He wanted his old life back. He wanted to make passionate love to Margaret Brodie, he wanted to go for a pint with Tom, and he wanted to beat Bill Reid at chess. But most of all he wanted to wake up in his bed and find that this was all a bad dream.

  Somewhere in his mind he knew that he’d never do any of these things...that life...if that were what he now had...would never be the same again. He felt like he should cry, but when he touched his eyes they were dry and cold.

  He caught a movement in his peripheral vision and turned. He was looking in the mirror. That was another of the myths he’d have to forget about.

  He scarcely recognized himself.

  His lips had thinned until they were little more than slim crescents of pale pink skin, and his teeth, previously stained and brown from smoking, were white and straight. But it was something in his eyes that made him shudder...they had become deep pools of blackness, almost no white visible.

  And then he noticed his beard. There was no gray in it and his fine hair shone with a vibrancy it had never, ever possessed. Before tonight Brian would have done almost anything to get a beard like this one, but now he thought that the price might have been just a little too high.

  He opened his mouth and prodded at his canine teeth with his index finger, just as the hunger flared once more inside him.

  Fangs slid out of his gums with a sudden burst of warm pain. He tasted salty blood in his mouth and his stomach turned, but it didn’t put out the fire. He grimaced at his image in the mirror as the fangs protruded over his lower lip.

  The demanding hunger suddenly got worse, doubling him up over the small sink. He looked up and saw the fiery red burning in the reflected eyes. He groaned and turned away from the mirror.

  And found that he was face to face with Donald Allan.

  “You must fight it,” the other man said.

  “But I need,” Brian said, a fresh bolt of pain hitting him, causing him to grip his lower stomach and almost fall.

  “I know. And you will keep needing it.”

  Brian saw the compassion in the other man’s eyes.

  “It is part of what we are, but it is not all that we are,” the man said, and to Brian it sounded like a quotation. “It will get easier as time passes, but it will never go completely.”

  “But what is it?” Brian asked.

  Donald Allan looked at him strangely before speaking.

  “I think you know that already. We are made as blood drinkers...and what you’re feeling is the thirst. Your body craves blood. But you won’t die without it...it’ll just feel like it for a while.”

  The cramp hit Brian again, tight, like a fist clenched in his stomach, forcing him to sit down hard on the toilet seat. He groaned as the pain got worse.

  “For God’s sake...what can I do?”

  “It is for his sake that you must fight it,” the other man said. “For his sake and for your own. Look inside yourself. Don’t you find it strange that you are taking this change in your circumstances so calmly? You have been turned into a vampire...a creature of evil from your wildest nightmares. And here you are, sitting in a toilet in the dark, hiding from the sun, locked in a room with a four hundred year old vampire. Are you afraid?”

  Brian found that he was calm, and unworried. And he didn’t feel as if the condition was abnormal.

  “Again, it is part of what we are,” Donald Allan said, “A certain acceptance of our lot. You need to use that acceptance, focus it to fight against the hunger.”

  “Talk to me,” Brian said. “Tell me more about what’s happening.”

  “I can tell you more history. Or maybe it’s only legend. Whatever, I’ll tell you as I heard it, from the one who saved me from Shoa.”

  As Donald Allan spoke Brian fought against the ravaging thirst inside him, concentrating only on the words as he listened.

  ~-o0O0o-~

  “In the old times the thirst was always with our kind. After Amro brought the Tenets of the Law down from the mountain there were those among us who tried to fight it, but they were never able to completely control it, and they had to drink, once every moon. They drank only from lowly creatures and never from the Sons of Adam, but even that was a sin in the eyes of the Lord.

  “And after Amro’s death and the fall of the temple there was only the thirst left. Kalent was the only one of the Eldren still awake, and the rest of the world belonged to the sons of Adam.

  “In the night there lived creatures like us, pale demons who were slaves to the thirst. And they knew nothing of the Tenets, and the temple was merely dust and rubble.

  “And so it went for centuries.

  “Kalent wandered the earth in all that time, searching for the place where Yoriah slept, hoping to bring the Lord’s power back to his people, but the Lord had turned his face away, and Kalent found only the night and the desert.

  “Until the time came when even Kalent, now the oldest of the old, despaired. For three hundred years he wandered in the icy wastes of the north far from the wrath of the sun.

  “And countless times he called out in his pain, crying to his Lord for forgiveness.

  “But never was he answered, and never did he meet another, not of the Eldren or of the Blood Children or of the Children of Adam.

  “And it came to pass that a great thirst came upon him, a raging heat that coursed through his body causing him to bend double almost to the ground.

  “His fingers became as claws and he tore at his flesh until the skin was burst and ravaged in a hundred places. He threw his body to the snow and rolled and crawled there like an animal until the white became pink and the thirst abated.

  “A white bear came to him, and spake, saying: ‘Why do you hurt brother. Take of my blood and make yourself whole.’

  “And Kalent looked at the creature and saw the life was strong in it. And the thirst returned redoubled. Kalent took a step forward, and another, and the beast turned its great neck towards him, offering itself.

  “Kalent’s teeth slid from his gums, bringing a fresh burst of pain, and he leaned forward to feed. But at the last he remembered the Tenets and pulled himself away.

  “He stood tall, ignoring the thirst, but a great pain took him, sending him into blackness. And he slept for many days.

  “When he awake he found that he was not alone. A daughter of the Tribe of Dan stood over him, a Blood Child. She was uncovered and her skin was like burnished silver in the light from the Moon and her hair was as black as the darkest night. Moonbeams danced in her
eyes and her lips were hot and welcoming.

  “And she danced for him, there on that cold plain, the stars framing her as she whirled and gyrated. Kalent felt heat rising in his body, warmth that he had never experienced, and a violent lust raged within him. She reached for him, taking his hand and guiding him towards her sex, towards the furnace that raged within her.

  “‘Come my Lord,’ she said. ‘Together we will bring back the old strength. We shall spill our blood and our seed will bring forth the Eldren once more.’

  “And Kalent rose up with her and together they danced in joy until the snow was packed hard under their stamping feet.

  “And she was comely and she was radiant and Kalent pulled her towards him and threw her to the ground where she lay, pliant, underneath him. The lust was huge within him as he tore off his clothing, and she smiled as he lay with her.

  “Her hands stretched towards him and the moon shone in her eyes. And he wanted her, and she wanted him, but the Tenets shone strong in his mind, and he pushed her away, averting his eyes from the sight of her.

  “And when she saw that she was spurned the Blood Child let out a scream which sent flurries of snow dancing around her and the stars stopped in their dance. Her body flowed and melted like wax on a candle, the very form of her being remolded and reformed until the great serpent himself stood before Kalent.

  “And the Serpent’s claws brought steam where they sat on the ice, and his eyes burned red, a deep red so hot that Kalent had to stand back lest he be consumed. But there was a smile on the face of the Serpent as he spoke, saying: ‘Come my Lord, and see what I would give you.’

  “The Serpent took Kalent to Uraon, the highest of the high, and bade him look over the lands beneath saying: ‘All this will be thine, all this and more. All I desire is that you bow down and pay homage to me as your brother Shoa did in the time long past.’

  “And Kalent looked down on the land, seeing the Adamities spreading like a plague on the face of the earth, their buildings belching noxious fumes, their waste polluting the land, their babies eating of the flesh of the Lord’s creation. And Kalent waxed greatly angered, but he held his speech.