Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  “Gott im Himmel. . .”

  Ghilardi stood at the mouth of the alley, staring at the corpse as it continued its accelerated deterioration. The body bloated and grew black, its head resembling the release valve on an overinflated tire.

  “How long have you been standing there?” I asked.

  “Ever since I heard it scream. I was afraid you might be. . . Jesus!” Ghilardi’s face suddenly turned the color of cold oatmeal as a ripe rush of gas abruptly gushed from the vampire’s rapidly bloating corpse. He immediately turned and vomited. I grabbed his good elbow and hurried him out of the alley and back onto the street.

  Ghilardi was visibly shaken. The vampire-hunting fantasies of his youth had been full of adventure and suspense, not the stink of putrefaction and the taste of vomit.

  “You’re hurt,” he said, pointing to my face. “We need to see about those gashes. God only knows what kind of filth was under that creature’s nails.” We halted beneath a street light so he could examine my facial wounds, only to find all that remained were four rapidly fading lines of pink.

  I looked down at my hands. They were trembling, but not out of fear.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ghilardi may have lost interest in vampire hunting after Frankfurt, but I didn’t. I discovered that the mass of hate and frustration knotted in my guts could be soothed by going on the hunt. I wanted to feel Morgan’s unlife squirting between my fingers, but until I found him, I was willing to settle for killing lesser beasts. I talked myself into believing what I was doing was a safety valve that allowed me to keep The Other in check, while performing a public service at the same time. In truth, I was doing it because I got off on it.

  I traveled all over Europe—even going so far as to make raids behind the Iron Curtain into Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland—while Ghilardi stayed home and filled his notebooks with information gleaned from studying me.

  Time begins to blur at this point. Ghilardi warned me that would start to happen. Vampires can go to ground for years, not because they’re superhumanly patient but simply because, after a few years, they begin to lose their sense of time. Although the endless series of nights spent on the prowl have begun to run together, I can still recall certain fragments...

  1975: She looked so out of place, wandering among the burn-outs and old hippies. Her blond curls, starched pinafore and patent-leather Mary Janes were strangely archaic, as if the child was lost in time as well as space. She drifted in and out of the crowd, plucking at the sleeves of passersby.

  It was very late for a little girl to be alone on the streets of Amsterdam, and the neighborhood was not one where mothers normally let their children roam unattended. I was lounging in front of a live-music club, waiting for the band to start playing. Several other patrons milled outside the front door, smoking their foul-smelling tobacco-and-hashish cigarettes. Inside the club, locked inside a special kiosk, an elderly woman sold state-approved hash, morphine, heroin and clean syringes.

  Most of the people clustered outside the bar were young. Many were dressed in faded denims sporting ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and Eco flag patches. Amsterdam was a favorite spot for hippies fleeing the growing complacency and consumerism of the ‘70s and the inevitability of their adulthood. Most of them looked stoned and bitter, as if perplexed by society passing them by. Judging by their accents, a good number of them were American.

  The little girl—surely no more than five or six—flitted from person to person, her small voice lost in the noise from the street. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I had a good guess: ‘Please, won’t someone take me home to my mother? I’m lost. I want to go home, but it’s too dark and I’m scared. Please, won’t someone take me home? I don’t live too far away ...’

  A tall, thin hippie with long hair and a longer face stooped so he could listen to her. He straightened, toying with the joint he held in one hand. He glanced back at the doorway to the club, then down at the pale little face. He shrugged his bony shoulders and she slipped her tiny hand into his large one and the odd pair started down the street.

  I followed at a discreet distance, listening to the little girl as she chattered away about her mother, her brothers and her kitten. The hippie nodded every so often, the scent of Turkish tobacco and marijuana marking his passage.

  The neighborhood began to decline the further they traveled, and soon the little girl was leading the hippie through one of the uglier districts in the city. The row houses were red brick and had once been pleasant, well-scrubbed homes, with pleasant, well-scrubbed families living in them. But that was before the Second World War. Something happened in that neighborhood during the Occupation— something nasty—and it had never recovered. I paused, fascinated by its similarity to the blighted district in Frankfurt. They shared the same poisonous aura; what could best be described as psychic gangrene.

  I shifted my vision into the Pretender spectrum, curious to see what marked this spot as a Bad Place. The buildings shimmered for a second, as if seen through a curtain of rising heat, and suddenly I saw a large flag marked with a swastika fluttering over the doorway of the center house as unsmiling men dressed in black leather topcoats and Gestapo insignia escorted frightened men, women, and children into the house. The vision then burst like a soap bubble as the little girl led the slack-faced hippie across the same threshold.

  The hippie must have been exceptionally stoned or too mesmerized by his companion to fail to notice that the little girl’s “home” was actually an abandoned building marked for demolition. I followed them into the house, coming to a halt in what was once the foyer. Strips of yellowed wallpaper hung in tatters like soiled bandages. Broken glass and a decade’s accumulation of filth gritted underneath my heels. There were discarded wine bottles and syringes scattered about, but the pungent aroma of human piss was missing. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a squat.

  The first floor was a long central hallway flanked by two rooms on either side. At the end of the corridor was a rickety staircase that led to the second story. I moved cautiously down the hall toward the stairs, glancing into each of the abandoned rooms. None of the rooms had doors. I felt a buzzing in my skull and the curtain of shimmering heat reappeared.

  The foyer changed around me. Suddenly the wallpaper was no longer peeling and a carpet ran the length of the hall. Everything looked very cheery, save for the Gestapo agents in one of the rooms putting out cigarettes on a young man tied to a chair. In the next room a pudgy man in a spotless white smock who looked like a kindly doctor sent from Central Casting carefully adjusted the connections on the car battery attached to an older man’s genitals. Across the hall, a screaming woman was raped by a German shepherd while a pair of Gestapo agents smoked cigarettes and laughed. I staggered backward, my guts convulsing. One of the Gestapo—a short, rat-faced man with wire-rim glasses—swiveled his head in my direction, scowling as if he’d seen something.

  The buzzing stopped and I was back in the deserted hallway, shivering like a junkie. No wonder there weren’t any squatters living here; even the most oblivious human could feel the evil in this place. I fought to control my trembling as I wondered how many other slices of hell the Nazis left scattered across Europe.

  As I turned to look into the fourth and final room before ascending to the second story, the hippie lurched through its doorway, one hand clamped about his neck as he tried to staunch the flow of blood spurting from his jugular. His Hawkwind T-shirt was already soaked, and his long, sad face was horribly white.

  The hippie wobbled drunkenly for a second, his eyes empty of sanity. His mouth opened and shut like a landed fish. I could hear the high-pitched tittering of a child echoing through the empty house. The hippie pitched forward, collapsing in my arms. I let the body drop onto the bare boards. My revulsion was heightened by the thrill sparked by the sight and smell of the red stuff smearing my hands.

  Judging from the sound, the thing was on the upper floor. I mounted the staircase carefully, grimacing as
the stairs groaned and creaked under my weight. Something small with crimson eyes landed on my back, tearing at my throat with sharp nails and needle-like teeth. I tumbled down the stairs, the hell-child riding me like a demented jockey. Pain raked my shoulders and the back of my neck as the thing tore at me. I had a vision of the unholy creature chewing away at my neck like a harbor rat on a rope.

  I slammed against the walls, attempting to shake loose the thing clinging to me. Plaster fell from the ceiling in gritty clouds, mingling with my blood, but the child-beast held tight. Desperate to free myself, I did a running cartwheel down the hall, which succeeded in dislodging my attacker.

  The child-vampire landed among a pile of discarded wine bottles and strips of wallpaper. She no longer resembled the golden-haired little girl who’d coerced the hapless young man into walking her home. Instead, she looked like a hideously withered crone. Her mouth was toothless except for two sharp little fangs and her eyes glowed like molten steel. The child-thing straightened her blood-soaked pinafore and glared at me, and then the little girl lost was back, weeping and trembling as she called for her mother.

  It was a good illusion. The urge to protect children is strongly ingrained in humans—especially females. I wavered, suddenly overcome with the desire to lift this darling child in my arms and try to console her...

  Trick! It’s a trick! The Other’s voice was like ice water in my brain.

  “I was going to pick that thing up,” I muttered aloud in astonishment.

  Hissing her anger, the child-vampire sprang at me, fangs unsheathed. The beast was as fast as an ape, but I managed to catch the tiny harridan in mid-leap. My hands tightened around her wizened neck. There was no way I could get to my knife without exposing myself to another assault, and I was already weakened by blood loss. The hateful thing twisted and writhed in my grasp, slashing my hands with her fangs and claws. Her eyes shone like a trapped rat’s. A surge of hate and disgust swept over me, and I began to throttle the child. Her yowls and curses grew in volume and she kicked at me with her Mary Janes. A reddish froth rimed her lip that was a combination of her saliva and my blood.

  It felt as if all of my willpower was being channeled down my arms and into my hands. The vampire-girl’s struggles became more and more frenzied as her eyes started from their sockets. I glimpsed the exposed muscle and finger bones in my hands, but I did not loosen my hold.

  I didn’t notice the buzzing, at first, as my attacker’s screeching served to camouflage it. But I became aware that I was being watched. I glanced out of the corner of my eyes and saw someone standing in the doorway of the room the hippie had emerged from. It appeared to be a man in early middle age, his hair touched by silver at the temples. He was dressed in a German SS colonel’s uniform, the stainless steel death’s-head insignia on his hat glinting in the dim light. He stood holding a pair of black leather gloves in one hand, and it was evident from the look of surprise on his face that he could see me as clearly as I saw him.

  That face. I knew it.

  It was Morgan.

  He flickered, like the picture on an old television set, and then disappeared. I looked down at the vampire-child, who finally stopped struggling because her head had come off in my hands. The tiny body lay on the cold floor; oozing something that looked like spaghetti sauce. I stared at the little head I held in my hands. To my horror, the child’s face had returned.

  For a horrifying moment I was certain I had gone mad and hallucinated everything that had just happened. Instead of stalking and slaying a vampire, I had kidnapped some poor little girl and murdered her in this terrible place.

  Suddenly the lost little girl ‘s smooth, baby-soft skin turned the color of antique ivory and began to crack and peel like parchment. All doubts concerning my sanity instantly evaporated. I dropped the vampire’s head and kicked it like a soccer ball. It bounced once and came to rest against the corpse of the hippie in the Hawkwind shirt.

  Although I searched the house from front door to attic for signs of other vampires, I could not bring myself to investigate the cellar. I took five steps into the darkness before I began to shake uncontrollably. Whatever had gone on down there all those years ago had been unspeakable, and was the source of the evil that tainted the block of houses like a ghostly cancer. No doubt this was where the vampire-child had nested during the day, safely wrapped in the heart of darkness.

  I fled the house, choking on bile and fear.

  Chapter Fifteen

  1976: It was the cemetery Morrison was buried in. It was also the same place Oscar Wilde, Voltaire, Moliere, Victor Hugo, and Edith Piaf, amongst others, happened to be interred. But as far as the teenagers were concerned, Jim Morrison was the only noteworthy occupant.

  Père Lachaise is a fantastic necropolis located on the northeast side of Paris, off the Boulevard de Belleville. At one time it had been the gardens attached to the villa of François d’Aix de Lachaise, confessor to Louis XI. But now it is home to over twenty thousand monuments and eight hundred thousand graves.

  There are probably more famous dead people in Père Lachaise than live ones in New York City. Sublime masters of the written word reside next to petit-bourgeois shopkeepers. Infamous hedonists and adulterers rest alongside proper Christian ladies who would have been scandalized by their proximity to such sin while they still breathed.

  Like any great city, Père Lachaise attracts a steady stream of tourists and vandals. The tour guides are fond of recounting how a Victorian lady was so shocked by the rampant griffon guarding Oscar Wilde’s tomb she removed the offending organ with a hammer she just happened to have in her purse. The French are pragmatic in regard to such acts; it’s the price you pay for fame. However, the graffiti left by the thousands of young pilgrims who flock each year to the grave of the Lizard King transcends mere desecration.

  Outside of a modest marble bust depicting the singer at the peak of his powers—its nose smashed by a recent incarnation of the Victorian castratrix—Morrison’s final resting place is simple and not very big, compared to some of the more elaborate monuments that fill the cemetery. The graffiti radiating from the doomed poet, however, makes up for what the grave lacks in physical size. It has been added to over the years, layer by layer, in countless different hands and a dozen different languages, until it formed a dense, interlocking mural. And no matter whether the medium is aerosol spray paint, felt-tipped marker, or pocket knife, the messages all boil down to: WE MISS YOU. Once Morrison’s plot could no longer contain the scrawled endearments, they began to spread onto the surrounding monuments, until the testimony of the fans’ love for their fallen hero obliterated the inscription on the plaque marking the tomb of Abelard and Heloise.

  I was lured to Paris by the rumors circulating among the counterculture diehards that Morrison’s ghost was wandering the cemetery at night in search of groupies. Normally, vampires avoid such well-trafficked areas, preferring to haunt lonelier locations. But are always young pilgrims wandering through Père Lachaise, the majority of them tripping balls. That makes it very tempting, indeed.

  While hanging out in a nearby bar, I overheard a gang of teenage fans discussing “visiting Jim” that night. They, too, had heard the stories about Morrison’s ghost. There were four of them, three boys and a girl, full of wine and acid and exhilarated by the prospect of glimpsing their idol’s specter. Since they’d never seen him in concert while alive, this was as close as they’d ever get to actually meeting their hero in the flesh. The oldest of the group couldn’t have been more than fourteen at the time of Morrison’s death.

  I followed them from a safe distance and watched as they boosted themselves over the wall into the graveyard, watching as they wove through the avenues of tilting stones. It was obvious they had made the trip dozens of times, as they threaded their way through the maze of marble and granite with the surefootedness of sherpas. This was their shrine and as much a part of their lives as the prayer wheels of Katmandu.

  It was a chilly October ni
ght and they were outfitted in American jeans and sneakers; two of the boys wore leather jackets while the third shivered in a flannel shirt that was no protection against the autumnal wind. The girl wore a heavy denim jacket with an intricately embroidered slogan on the back that read NO ONE HERE GETS OUT ALIVE. The boy in the flannel shirt carried a large wine bottle, which he stopped to drink from every few steps. His companions hissed at him to keep up. Looking cold and disgruntled, he hurried after them.

  One of the boys in the leather jackets had a knapsack with him, which he proceeded to empty once they reached the grave site. He produced several candle stubs, two more bottles of wine and several joints.

  “You think we’ll see him, Raoul?” whispered the girl as she hugged her elbows for warmth.

  The older boy nodded. “Sure. Jean-Michel’s cousin, Philippe, saw Jim just last week.”

  The boy in the flannel shirt snorted derisively, shifting from foot to foot in order to keep from freezing. “Philippe sees lots of things. He lives off acid and Vichy water.”

  The girl’s tone was colder than the wind knifing through the graveyard. “I don’t think you want to see him, Pierre. You’re going to ruin everything.”

  Pierre looked wounded. It was painfully obvious that the only reason he was standing in the middle of a cemetery in the middle of the night, waiting for a ghost to put in an appearance, was because of the girl.

  Raoul carefully arranged the candles into a lopsided circle atop the marble slab covering the grave. “Celeste is right,” he said, touching each wick with his lighter. “If you don’t want to see him, you won’t. You can’t think negative thoughts, Pierre, or you’ll keep him away.”