by Derry Sandy
She slipped out of bed, uncertain why she was bothering to get out of bed at all. She was not yet hungry and it was still too early for breakfast, anyway. Yet she headed for the door. On her way down the hall, her hand brushed against the butt of the hilt of Voss’ sword which he had left propped against the wall near her door.
Take it, a voice whispered inside her head. She jerked her hand away and stared at the beautiful weapon, wondering if the voice had been real. She reached down and touched the sword again but no voice spoke this time. Almost subconsciously, she wrapped her fingers around the hilt and picked up the sword. It was lighter than it should be for a katana, certainly lighter than the bokken she had used the night before.
She slid the blade out of the red lacquered scabbard. It did not gleam like polished steel but was a matte grey like gunmetal. It was a work of art, the blade so ornately engraved that she wondered if it was merely a decorative sword, She gingerly tested the edge with her thumb and even that light touch drew blood. Beyond sharp. She slid it back into the sheath and cradled the weapon against her chest like a baby as she left the room.
***
Nathan had no intention of ringing the doorbell or using any sort of trickery or guile to capture the Lisa woman. He was too powerful to employ artifice. He had decided to jump the fence, kill who needed to be killed, and take the woman. The weird girl that the fag Clarence insisted on bringing with them struggled to match his stride and he decided that the first chance he got, he would twist her neck. Nathan was shielding his thoughts so that neither Clarence nor the others could listen in on them. It was another little trick that Clarence was ignorant of and that would prove their supposed leader’s undoing.
“You’re not going to do what he told you to do, are you?” the girl asked. He did not respond but doubled his pace. Instead of trying to keep up, she just stopped and stood staring after his advancing back. Stupid little bitch.
***
Rebecca and Damian both agreed they were still hungry. They could smell other people in the house, clean people, tasty people. There was absolutely no way they would hide in the bushes at the back while Nathan and Fifty-seven had all the fun. When they got to the rear wall, Rebecca kicked off her shoes and scaled straight up its vine covered face like a gecko, her palms and soles adhering to the wall in a reptilian manner.
Damian followed soon after. They were both shielding their thoughts, a skill Nathan had passed on to them in his hopes that they would help him kill the man-whore when it was time. They dropped down on the opposite side of the wall as lightly as silk cotton seeds in the breeze. On this part of the property the house was about two hundred meters from the wall, and the grounds inclined on the approach to the house. There were no trees apart from those lining the winding driveway. If anyone cared to look out the back window they would be seen instantly. Neither of them cared about being seen however, it was time to eat. Their meals would not taste quite as sumptuous as they would if they were marinated in moonlight but in their famished state the difference would be negligible. The marauding maboya started toward the house at a low jog, already beginning to forget their intended purpose and savoring the violence to come.
***
In the hallway the house lights blinked on and off five times in rapid succession paused for six seconds then repeated the sequence, indicating that the perimeter alarm had been tripped. There was no barbed wire atop Stone’s walls, a decision that was both traditional and aesthetic. The founding members of the Order thought that barbed wire was an outward display of weakness and the men of the Order were anything but weak. Instead of concertina coil, the tops of the walls were protected by infrared beams that were invisible to the naked eye. If the beam was broken by anything bigger than a humming-bird, it triggered the silent alarm inside the house.
The arrangement could be annoying as sometimes a squirrel, a manicou, or even a large falling leaf would trigger the alarm. But every time the system was tripped the occupants of the house followed the same protocols. Someone had to check the camera feed then manually reset the alarm if all was clear. Kamara brought up the security videos on a desktop computer in the hallway. There were twenty different video streams each represented in individual squares on the wide screen monitor, but the system automatically highlighted the camera feeds nearest to the disturbance with a yellow border.
The security video came up just in time for her to see a woman then a man, both barefoot, leap down from the top of the twenty-foot wall and land like cats inside Stone’s boundaries. Something about them nauseated Kamara. They moved with predatory urgency and exuded a vulture-like aura. They were not even attempting to hide their approach to the house.
The Nights of Need tattoo itched intensely. Kamara glanced at her hand and saw that the parade of elephants had been replaced by a leaping tigress. Another feed was highlighted on the computer monitor, showing another man scaling the front fence. Like the first two, he did not bother concealing himself as he walked up the long winding driveway. Kamara keyed in the sequence that reset the alarm. She also entered the code that would lock down the house entirely, automatically closing and locking all the outer windows and doors. With the house locked down, she could simply wait the intruders out. They could bang away at the exterior all they wanted, the glass would not shatter and the doors would not yield.
They will not be kept out by the doors.
She did not know where the idea came from but the minute it presented itself to her consciousness she knew it to be true. The three advancing strangers had come from a place where doors did not matter. She reached for her mobile and called Rohan’s number but it rang without answer. He must be on his way, she thought hopefully. She would have to hold off the intruders on her own, or at least until Rohan and Voss returned.
She considered alerting Jonah, Imelda and Lisa, but wondered what good that would do? Lisa could not wield a gun and Jonah and his wife lived in their cottage on the grounds away from the imminent danger. Alerting them would only put the elderly couple in harm’s way.
She checked the camera feeds again. Motion sensors around Stone had switched on the cameras at the back where the pair that had come over the wall was now inspecting one of the rear doors. The door was made of a solid plate of steel laminated between oak panels. Maybe the voice in her head was wrong and the door would hold them.
Another security feed lit up. The man who had come over the fence was standing stock still and staring up at one of the windows on the second storey. He seemed to be sniffing the air. Then the woman at the back door lay flat on the ground and began to squeeze under the door, through the tiny gap between the bottom of the door and the tiled floor.
Kamara blinked several times to convince herself that what she was witnessing was real. The woman’s body pressed beneath the door like some spineless, boneless worm, flattening as she used her legs to advance. Her progress was slow and apparently uncomfortable but she was getting in. Her companion patiently waited his turn. Kamara sprinted for Lisa’s room.
“Wake up, Lisa. Wake up. We’re under attack,” she shouted as she headed towards Lisa’s room. We’re being invaded by some new monster, she thought. Lisa and I can probably escape through the underground walkway that led to Jonah’s and Imelda’s home.
Chapter 19
Rohan was first through the gap in the metal door. The moment he was through, a row of torches in sconces along the wall came alive. The torches burned a smoky orange that left a trail of greasy soot on the walls above the flame.
He was in a stone hallway with windowless walls that arched up toward a low domed ceiling. At regular intervals along the wall there were doors.
More doors. Nothing good ever came out of doors in this house, Rohan thought. as the other men emerged through the gap and joined him in the hall.
“Fresh air,” Cassan said, “Do you smell it? There is a window or a door open down here that leads outside.”
Cassan was right. The air in the stone hall was cool and
fresh and smelled of the night outside. Rohan felt a sliver of hope. He longed to escape the oppressiveness of the house.
“As we have seen before an open portal does not guarantee anything,” Voss replied. “I feel like we have been herded here.”
Both men spoke in a hush even though the hallway appeared empty. Rohan sensed that this area of the house felt expectantly hungry, like a glutton salivating over a shank of meat. From beyond the door erupted sounds of violence. The goliath hounds were tearing into somebody or somebodies. Staccato gunfire was drowned out by screams as the hounds prevailed.
“The storm troopers followed us down apparently. Wonder what they did with their resurrected comrades?” Cassan said as he pushed the steel door to close the gap through which they had come. The door swung closed silently and smoothly though it had previously been unyielding. Rohan knew instinctively that they would not be able to retreat through that portal and he did not bother to confirm that the door would not open again.
The only way was forward, down the hall of torches and cells. The men began advancing along the hall. Rohan and Voss hugged the left side, Wrise and Cassan the right. The hall went on and on. Rohan began to think that the house intended to walk them to death.
He heard a sound. At first he held his tongue thinking that it was a figment of his imagination, but he soon heard it again.
“Does anyone else hear that? Someone singing?”
“I thought I was imagining it,” Wrise replied. “There it is again.”
The voice was soft and plaintive, but heartbreakingly sweet and seemed to be coming out of the walls themselves. The hall suddenly terminated in a circular junction. The junction branched off into six different hallways all of which looked identical to the one they exited. At the center of the circle, a woman knelt. Her back was to them and she was singing.
“Deeper yet, deeper yet,
Into the crimson flood;
Deeper yet, deeper yet,
Under the precious blood.”
Rohan thought he knew the song, it was some sort of hymn, but for some reason he felt that the woman’s meaning was different from the sentiments of the original author.
“Hello?” Wrise hissed. “Woman.”
The woman acted as if she did not hear them and she continued to sing. Cassan and Wrise approached her slowly. Wrise placed a hand on her shoulder as if to turn her around and the woman crumbled into a pile of grey ash.
“I’m tired of this crap,” Wrise said as he brushed his hands vigorously against the seat of his pants. He had paled visibly. Voss held a finger to his lips signaling that they be quiet. He seemed to be straining the hear something.
“Something is coming,” Voss said. “We have to go. Now.”
Rohan strained his ears and he heard it too, a rapid pitter patter, the sound of many bare feet slapping the stone floor in a dead run.
“The things from the cells. They’re out,” Voss said as he licked a finger and held it up testing the air to find the direction of the source of the draft.
“What do you mean the things from the cells?” Cassan asked. “I didn’t hear a thing coming along the halls.
“They were trying to be quiet, but I heard them. Rohan, I know you heard them too.” Voss said.
Rohan had heard them, but he had felt it better not to mention it. They were already in a bad situation. But the cells had contained people or creatures of some sort. He heard their breathing, low and rasping, carefully quiet but definitely there.
“They must be maboya, like the thing that grabbed me and pulled me through the box,” Cassan said.
Voss pointed down one of the halls and led the way down the tunnel in which the draft felt strongest. Wrise unlimbered his shotgun. Rohan checked his own weapon. They hustled down the cell lined, torch lit passageway at a brisk jog. They came to another junction and this time there were ten hallways from which to choose.
Voss was again testing the air when the last cell in the hallway they had just exited creaked open slowly. A beast crawled out on all fours. It wore the tattered remnants of trousers, its body was completely hairless, and blue veins pulsed under the translucent whiteness of its skin. Perhaps it had once been a person, but that was a long time ago. Its arms were over-long, insectile and terminated in wicked black claws. It had two elbows on each arm and its knee joints faced the wrong direction. It was eyeless and had no nostrils, but this did not seem to impede it. Its mouth was a thin red slash in the flesh of its face and was filled with a multitude of needle-like black teeth. It rose to its full height and sprinted towards them, its feet making a slapping noise against the stones of the floor.
Rohan took aim and fired in a burst. The rounds made a neat grouping of black puncture marks in the onrushing creature’s chest but it neither bled nor slowed down. All the men opened fire and the creature was driven back by the impact of the fusillade and fell, but they continued firing, even though they knew they were wasting time and ammunition on this one. There would be many more. Voss held up a fist and the men stopped shooting.
The monstrosity lay on the floor writhing and shrieking. The bullets had all but cut it in half. In the hallway eight more cells doors opened and eight more creatures crawled out. Rohan flung an incendiary grenade into the hall of cells and the four men fled down another hallway led by Voss. The heat of the explosion and the shrieks of the creatures followed them on a pressure wave.
This time the house did not wait for them to reach a junction. Cells opened left and right as they ran. The men sprinted, shooting as they went. Rohan’s sub machine gun clicked empty. He drew his sidearm and was immediately forced to empty the clip into the forehead of a maboya as it crawled out of one of the cells. It fell back. The creatures seemed to be weak when they first exited the cells but their strength increased quickly and this one rose again as Rohan ran past its cell.
Rohan drew a large kukri knife from a sheath at his back. One of the pale monstrosities rose up in front of him and he slammed the butt of the knife into the creature’s face. It succumbed to the blow. Rohan looked back and realized that somewhere in the mêlée he had become separated from the others, surrounded by the maboya and fighting alone. He barely had time to panic when suddenly Cassan was at his side, he held one of the iron torches in a two-handed grip and was laying about with it viciously.
“Do you have a song for this?” Rohan shouted as he cleaved the face of one of the creatures in half.
“Too many of them, we would be overrun, before the hypnosis took hold.”
Cassan and Rohan cut and clubbed their way up the halls. The maboya were persistent and growing stronger by the moment. Voss and Wrise were nowhere to be seen. Rohan saw a break in the press and he and Cassan began to run. Rohan chucked his last incendiary grenade over his shoulder and ducked around a corner to avoid the blast. That action bought them a moment’s reprieve. He and Cassan were in another hallway, with more cells, already wide open. The occupants however, were absent.
There was no draft in this hallway and Rohan had no idea where he should go, so he pressed forward at random. They were approaching another junction. This one led to three different halls. He and Cassan ran towards it, but just as they were about to enter, maboya swarmed. This group was neither weak nor crawling. They came like a swarm of pale, earthbound locusts, poorly clad in the tattered remnants of garments from a forgotten life. Their black teeth gnashing in a vile hunger, their eyeless gaze seeing all.
Rohan and Cassan started to run back the way they came, but the way was blocked by another group of the creatures, many of which sported burns from Rohan’s grenade.
“Into that cell,” Rohan shouted. He dove into the closest one with Cassan hard on his heels and he swung the door shut. One of the creatures managed to get its arm into the doorway, preventing it from closing completely. Rohan cut it off with his machete-knife and slammed the iron door closed. The severed arm crawled toward Cassan slowly and he kicked it away. There was no way to secure the door from the ins
ide so Rohan and Cassan leaned on the door while the creatures on the other side pushed and pressed and clawed.
“Doesn’t look too good, aye?” Cassan said stating the obvious. Rohan scanned the room frantically. No doors no windows, just a levered crank set into the wall and shackles hanging from the low ceiling. There was a wooden table off to a corner. The situation was hopeless. The only thing saving them was the fact that the maboya were not acting as a team in pushing the door. Some pushed while others clawed while others hammered their fists.
“You have any more bullets?” Rohan asked.
“If I did, I wouldn’t be clubbing them with a torch now would I?” Cassan replied sarcastically, gesturing with the conical metal bracket.
Then Rohan noticed a pool of white liquid running under the door, as if someone had spilled a gallon jug of milk on the opposite side of the doorway. The puddle pooled around their feet. Pale hands with black claws suddenly shot out of the puddle and grabbed Cassan’s legs. The hands clawed up Cassan’s thighs as he kicked frantically, the puddle rapidly coalesced into a maboya and it held Cassan in its grasp. Rohan kicked at it, as best as he could while still struggling to hold the door. The creature bit into Cassan’s lower arm and held on. Cassan immediately began to vomit a stream of greasy black bile even as he struggled in the creature’s grip.
The press of bodies on the other side of the door forced Rohan back, an arm squeezed in, then a leg, and then maboya swarmed into the room. Rohan began cutting and stabbing, kicking and punching frantically and viciously, the press enveloped Cassan obscuring Rohan’s view of him. He was fighting for own his life now.
The big razor-sharp knife severed hands and heads but there were too many. A clawed hand raked across his face, tearing his cheek to ribbons and barely missing his eye. The wound burned like a brand. They pulled him down. He was on the ground, hands gripped his limbs like steel bands and he feared they would tear him apart.
