Somehow it made him feel stronger, more assured, and he felt even better when he found that he still had five quarrels in his shoulder holster.
Now all he had to worry about was the ladder.
He found out how hard that was going to be several minutes later.
His hand hit one of the metal uprights and he pulled himself along the ground using only the strength in his arms until he hugged the lower rungs of the ladder. He looked up, but there was only blackness.
There was still no pain from his leg, and when he touched the wound with his hand it came away sticky, not wet. He wasn’t losing any more blood, but he had a feeling that there was a good reason for that...he didn’t have much left to lose.
He knew that he had to keep moving. If he stopped moving the lethargy would return, and if he lost consciousness he would never regain it. And then, the next time he woke, he might be one of them. He fingered the crossbow then put it away deep in its specially sewn pocket in his overcoat.
He grabbed the ladder with both hands and began to pull himself upright until he stood on his right leg. The room seemed to spin and for once he felt thankful for the darkness.
Gritting his teeth against the complaints from every muscle he started to climb.
And as he climbed he became aware of a sound, quiet at first, but getting steadily louder, a glottal chant that was almost a song.
The bloodsuckers were up there, in the house. If he was going to escape, he would have to get past them first.
CHAPTER 9
TONY’S BEDROOM was full of people, and it had grown, widened and expanded to many times its normal size. It wasn’t his bedroom anymore, yet somehow it was. It was both familiar and strange, a duality that his mind struggled to encompass.
He looked up into his father’s face, his mind full of questions. He tried to speak, but he was choked with emotion. He felt so much love for this big man who carried him. Already his head was full of dreams of Florida. His dad looked down at him and smiled, and with that smile all Tony’s remaining worries disappeared.
His dad laid him down on his bed and Tony sank back into the soft pillows. Stars spun above his head, but still that didn’t seem out of the ordinary.
He watched the stars dance as his dad moved away from him and stood, not more than four feet away. There was a faraway look in his dad’s eyes, a strange longing for something Tony didn’t understand.
Dad started to sing, a strange, mournful tune that spoke to Tony of far away, long ago times. The other people in the room joined in; a dissonant chorus like a group of cats in the early hours of the morning. Tony raised his head to see better.
Why are all these people in my bedroom?
There was the headmaster, his always-crisp suit now wrinkled and creased. And surely that was Mr. Potts the janitor? He looked somehow naked without the ever-present cigarette hanging from his lower lip.
Another voice joined the chorus, a high sweet soprano, and Tony turned his head and looked straight into the eyes of his mother.
“Don’t worry son,” she said, but it didn’t sound like that. It sounded like she was chewing on a persistent lump of gristle, almost as if she had just returned from the dentists. As if to confirm it a thin stream of drool ran from the left-hand corner of her mouth.
Tony suddenly felt fear, an instinctive feeling that something was badly wrong. He squirmed on the bed but it was as if he was held tight by strong, heavy ropes.
The singing got louder, then louder still, the beat speeding up, thumping and drumming its way into his head, synchronizing with his heartbeat. The people crowded closer around his bed but they were held back, as if by an invisible wall. The stars danced faster overhead and his father seemed to grow and swell until he stood head and shoulders above the rest.
And then another figure moved into view, one that he knew, that he thought he should know better.
Miss Brodie, the PE teacher stood above him. She looked down at him, but her eyes were looking at something else entirely, staring sightlessly at something further away...much further away.
Tony squirmed, trying to move against the invisible cords that bound him. His left hand touched something at his waist, something leathery. As his hand closed over the black book the room span and swirled and reality crashed in around him in the space of a heartbeat.
He screamed.
~-o0O0o-~
He wasn’t going to make it.
Jim Kerr hung by his fingertips from the ladder. He was almost halfway there…somewhere between the roof and the floor of the second cellar. But it had been harder than anything he had ever done in his life.
He swung his right foot forward, trying to gain purchase on a rung of the ladder, but his foot only met air, and again at the second attempt. He shifted his body slightly to the left, almost dislodging the precarious hold he had.
He should have rested when he reached the second floor, but he knew that once he stopped he’d never get started again.
Not that it mattered greatly. He was just going to hang here for a while, the next rung an impossible eight inches above him.
His left leg felt like a block of ice, a block that was getting heavier and heavier, as if he dragged a small iceberg beneath him. He had no feeling left in his arms, just a warm deadness, but his neck and shoulder muscles were on fire, the sinews standing out proud from his flesh.
There was a trickle of blood from the wound at his wrist, black ooze that looked more like engine grease than blood, and he felt that he was sliding in and out of sleep. It was hard to be sure...the climb had become one long nightmare and he could barely remember anything other than the need to reach the next rung. There was nothing in the past behind him, and only blackness ahead of him.
He tried to relax, to do the trick with the numbers, but even that failed him as his concentration wavered and the pains in his body grew too much to be ignored.
Blackness filled his sight and his mind, creeping through his body, offering sleep and rest. His fingertips began to slide from the metal and Jim Kerr was almost thankful.
And that was when he heard it. Muffled, far away, but a sound that pierced him and brought coldness where there had been warmth.
He grabbed at the rung with fingers that had suddenly taken new strength. His right foot swung, back, forward, and found a purchase.
He pushed himself upwards, heading for the one sound in the world he would never be able to refuse...the scream of a child in mortal terror.
~-o0O0o-~
“Put me down Brian,” Margaret said. “I’ve got to check on David.”
As she was lowered to the floor she looked into Brian’s eyes and had to step back at the flame of naked lust that burned in him.
“Down boy,” she said. “I’ll only be a minute.”
But as she walked along the corridor to their son’s bedroom she felt the chill again, the ice that seemed to have settled deep in her bones.
“Go and warm up the bed,” she called over her shoulder. “I don’t see why it should always be me that does it.”
She put out a hand to open the door to David’s bedroom and immediately jerked it back as a deep pain spread through her fingers and palm, up as far as her wrist. It was as if someone had just ran a red-hot poker through her hand.
For an instant, as short a time as the blink of an eye, there was a dirty blood soaked bandage covering her hand. She almost remembered, almost got hold of the memory, but then she blinked and there was only the smooth skin of her hand and the cold metal of the doorknob.
The doorknob spun loosely in her hand and she told herself to remind Brian to fix it in the morning...she’d been at him for months about it. He’d always been hopeless around the house but she was determined that she wasn’t going to do it all. She couldn’t let him hide behind a plea of incompetence forever.
She pushed the door open, slowly so as to avoid creaks. Moonlight was streaming in the skylight window above the boy’s bed, lighting his face in silver and blac
k.
Margaret staggered, hit so suddenly by a memory that her brain almost couldn’t contain it.
There had been another moonlit night, a dome of glass in an old house, and a mosaic that was almost alive.
She remembered it, vividly, but it could never have happened, for in that memory Brian had disappeared, and hadn’t she just left him outside their bedroom? Hadn’t they been married for twelve years?
Hadn’t they?
David moaned in his sleep and she moved into the bedroom. The boy looked so much like his father it almost broke her heart to look at him.
But there was something wrong. The boy was thrashing and tossing, and she could see his sweat stain his pajamas. She moved closer, just as the boy’s eyes snapped open.
A stranger’s eyes looked out at her from her son’s face…brown where they should have been blue. The boy screamed, so loudly that the sound reverberated around in her head. And singing joined the echo; a deep chant that seemed both far away and very close, as if it was fading in and out of reality.
“Margaret,” the boy on the bed shouted, and she gasped. David always called her Mum, but there was something in the boy’s voice that she recognized from long ago, from a time that was more of a dream than a memory.
“Tony?” she whispered, and suddenly the pain in her hand was back. The shadows around her seemed to shift and meld into one another until they had become a throng of people pressed close around the small bed.
The boy on the bed strained, trying to move, but he seemed to be held down against the sheets.
“Margaret?” a voice said, and at first she thought it was the boy again, the strange boy with her son’s face. Then the call came again and she turned to see Brian standing by the bedroom door.
“There’s something wrong with David,” she said, but Brian only smiled, and she got the chill back again.
“Oh yes,” Brian said. “There’s definitely something wrong with him.”
The boy screamed again, louder this time, and the distant chanting got closer and louder.
“Look closely,” Brian said. “Look at his teeth.”
She bent over then recoiled as twin fangs slid from the boy’s mouth. She felt something being put in her hand, something cold and heavy. It took several seconds for her to realize that she held a sword.
“Where did you get this?” she said.
There was no answer. Then, above the chanting, a gravely voice spoke.
“You must kill him,” it said. “Kill him and be free.”
She looked at Brian. Only it wasn’t Brian anymore.
The illusion fell away, as if it had never existed. Thirteen years of her life faded and dissolved, the memory fading to gray until it was the dream and the dream was the new reality. Tears threatened to flow at the corners of her eyes, but the sight that came into focus around her quelled them at their source.
~-o0O0o-~
She stood in the domed room, moonlight bathing her in shades of gray. Tony lay at her feet, struggling as if tied up in ropes although there was no visible sign of confinement.
They were in the middle of the mosaic, Tony’s head resting just above the great jaws of the serpent. Encircling the mosaic, but not stepping inside its perimeter, was a ring of vampires, all chanting and swaying, eyes closed and mouths open revealing sets of fangs that drooled silver streams of saliva to the floor.
They stamped their feet in time with the chant, raising small clouds of dust to hang in the air. The chanting got louder, and the stamping grew more frenzied. The sword felt ever heavier in her hand and she would have dropped it but her fingers refused to release their grip.
But that wasn’t the worst. There was something else in the circle with them, something tall and white and powerful...a creature with blazing eyes that Margaret couldn’t refuse.
Her wrist flexed and the sword came up. She stared at the moon reflected in the shining metal, transfixed by its glare. The chanting rose to a crescendo as she brought the sword up over her head in one easy action.
The boy on the ground beneath her screamed her name, twice, and although she heard him, her body was following other orders. She brought the sword down and the vampires screamed in ecstasy.
~-o0O0o-~
Brian was getting used to the sensation. Hills and roads and trees flashed past him, but he found that if he kept his eyes open and stared straight ahead he could keep the nausea at bay. The sensation of things coming at you at speed was still disconcerting, but little more so than being involved in a fast arcade game.
And he didn’t have long to suffer it. Barely ten seconds had elapsed when he seemed to take one last step and his foot crunched down on gravel. The world stopped moving with a jolt that threatened to throw him, disoriented, off his feet, and his legs felt as if he had just stepped off a boat after long hours in rough seas.
They were in front of the house again, its black stone seeming no less menacing than before.
Donald Allan put a finger to his lips in an exaggerated request for silence. At first Brian didn’t hear anything, but then it came to him…the far off, muted chorus of chanting.
“Come on,” Donald Allan whispered, and, walking over to the nearest wall began to climb it as it had steps and handholds built in exactly where he wanted them to be.
Brian was about to complain, but he realized that this was just another manifestation of what he had become, just another piece of his learning. He had no idea what he was doing here, no concept of what they were up against. All he knew was that Donald Allan was his best hope. He walked up to the wall looking up to see the vampire some ten feet above him.
He placed his hands to the stone, not knowing what to expect. He found that his fingertips found crevices and holds of their own volition. He pulled himself upwards, feeling as light as a small bird, and was surprised to look down and find the ground already five feet below him.
Donald Allan was only another black shape among the turrets above him, and it wasn’t until the vampire moved that Brian could pick him out and follow him upward. Ten seconds later they were standing together on the edge of the roof.
Far off to the east there was a red glow in the sky, a glow that flared and spat, lighting the low clouds in shades of vivid pink. Across the night air came the sharp retorts of weapons fire and, just once, Brian thought he heard a high animal scream that was sharply cut off.
From behind them the sound of chanting was coming louder…louder and faster, as if building to some kind of a climax.
Brian turned to speak to Donald Allan, but the vampire was already off and away across the roof, striding purposefully across the sloping slates as if he was strolling on a pavement. Brian had little choice but to follow.
The moon was high in the sky overhead, lighting the roof space in blue-silver patches of dark and shadow, like a nightmare expressionist film, all angles and blackness. Donald Allan was a black silhouette against the stars and suddenly Brian wanted to be far away, somewhere the sun shone and he didn’t have a new pair of teeth in his gums.
Donald Allan stopped and waved him forward, indicating with complex gestures that Brian should be quiet and careful, and that there was something just over the next slope of the roof that required their attention.
Brian joined the vampire, navigating the slopes and falls of the roof with remarkable ease, and together they peered over the crest of the roof.
They were looking down into the domed room.
The mosaic curled on the floor beneath them, its colors magnified and somehow sharpened by the glass of the dome. The chanting was coming from the room, but there was no sign of its source...only the circle of the mosaic could be seen from their vantage point.
A young boy lay in the middle of the circle, and at first Brian didn’t recognize him. He gasped as the boy’s eyes opened.
“Tony Dickie?” he said.
A strong hand clamped over his mouth as Donald Allan forced him into silence.
The chanting got louder, t
hen louder still, and a dull vibration shook the roof beneath them in time with the chant. The glass of the dome wavered and distorted the scene below so that the serpent seemed to coil and uncoil with each vibration.
And then a figure walked into the circle, slowly, her movements ritualized as if she was taking part in some Zen dance. Brian didn’t have to see her face...one look at that hair was enough...Margaret was in the room beneath him.
He made to move forward, not thinking of his action, knowing only that he needed to be down there, but there seemed to be an iron bar across his chest. He looked down to find Donald Allan’s arm blocking any further movement.
“Wait,” the vampire said, and went back to watching the scene below.
But Brian found it almost impossible to watch. A pale creature appeared at the edge of the circle. Brian saw little more than an arm and a lower leg.
“Shoa,” Donald Allan whispered.
The creature handed a sword to Margaret, a shining bar of silver and again Brian leaned forward.
The sword came up and back.
“No,” Brian shouted, and pushed past the vampire’s outstretched hand, diving for the dome like a parachutist.
He hit the glass and kept on going.
~-o0O0o-~
Jim Kerr pulled himself over the lip of the trapdoor and dragged his bad leg behind him as he rolled onto the cool linoleum of the kitchen floor. His leg flopped out of the trapdoor like a cold, dead slab of fish, and it was only as he lay still that he realized that the cold numbness had reached as far as his waist...everything below belt level frozen and dead.
The climb had taken what little strength he had left. He lay there, trying to get air into his lungs, pretending to himself that it was only tiredness, a momentary weakness that would pass with time.
He was closer to the chanting now, close enough to hear individual voices, men, woman, and yes, children, their voices mingled in the demonic chorus.
Eldren: The Book of the Dark Page 26
