Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

  Yadrim closed his eyes and listened. The Ruined City.

  He had confronted Fiona in dreams before. It was best to be cautious, particularly given that what he was about to do would cost him dearly. An approach from an unexpected direction was called for.

  Yadrim stepped inside the apartment.

  The old spell was still in force, the one that had been cast long ago, the one that prohibited vampires from crossing thresholds uninvited. The spell was weak, as everything in this world was weak, and it was enough to keep this place’s vampires out.

  But Yadrim was another matter.

  He shook as the cost of the violation hit him. The bone charms rattled and swayed and added their meagre strength to the old spell of forbidding. He put one foot in front of the other, across the room, until he could kneel down beside the fleshy woman with the dog.

  Given the trying conditions, he would have to feed on her the old-fashioned way. He put a trembling hand to the side of the woman’s head and tipped it away from him. He leaned close and opened his mouth.

  His face changed.

  He bit deep into her neck and her drug-stained blood filled his mouth.

  Chapter 17 – Rob and Julian, Thursday Night

  At the age of fifty-three Brody had decided to become a criminal. Sometimes he worked for himself, while other times he did jobs for people like Jacob Mandellan.

  He was a man who believed society and the individual within it had a contract with each other. Get a job, obey the law, pay your taxes and produce offspring that didn’t grow up to become thieves or murderers – that was the individual’s part of the contract. In return, society would try to keep you safe, maintain the roads you drove on, help you out when you were sick, take care of you when you were too old to control your bladder and not let too many foreigners into the country to steal your job.

  Society, in his opinion, had not done such a good job of its end of things. Unions kept striking, bankers used the treasury to pay their debts, the public health service didn’t know the pointy end of a needle from the plunger end and there were a lot of East Europeans at the plant where he worked.

  Brody no longer felt obliged to uphold his end of the bargain.

  A life of crime was exciting. He was a gentleman thief in a brown leather jacket and shades, with a lad or two at hand who were clever with a crowbar. A daring break-in here, a truck hijack there, followed by haggling off the proceeds to a genuine shady character. Not those half-starved nutcase drug dealers but proper criminals like fences and knee-breakers. It beat Friday evenings at the pub with the usual crowd. Besides, the pub had started playing music he barely called music in an effort to attract kids who didn’t know how to pull their trousers up.

  His little ventures helped put money away for his retirement as well. With bankers raiding the treasury to buy themselves new sports cars and Mediterranean condos, with politicians too spineless to stop them, only a daft old bugger would rely on the government to have a pension for him when that time eventually came round. Brody tucked his rolls of money in shoe boxes. It was a safer investment.

  They were all good reasons, though he had never spoken them aloud. He thumbed through them in his mind in quieter moments, to remind himself that the bargain with society was a sham, but he left out the most important reason for his lifestyle change.

  Brody had turned to a life of genteel crime because he was having a mid-life crisis.

  “Where did this rain come from then?” Owen hunched over the wheel of the van as if to hold it down. He was a gorilla of a man in his late thirties who was going bald with indecent haste. Brody had located him at the local gym and had made use of his brute strength and walnut-sized brain on several occasions. He was out of work and he complained there were no jobs to be had, the excuse he lurked behind for not wanting to join the ranks of the employed.

  “Steady on, Owen,” Brody said. “Mind you don’t miss the turn-off.”

  “Haven’t seen it yet,” said Dave, Owen’s nephew. He was in the back of the van and his thick forearms dangled over the seat. Like Owen he spent most of his day in the gym and tried not to think of the terrifying spectre of a social worker getting him into the workforce. “It’s not like it’ll flash by with us going at this speed.”

  “Rain’s got everyone sticking to first and second gear,” Owen said. “Stupid tossers. What about the rest of us who want to get to where we’re going?”

  “We’ll be there soon enough,” Brody said. Jacob Mandellan had given him a reasonable window of time, considering the simplicity of the job. “Just watch out for that turn-off.”

  “Should have brought a satnav,” Dave said.

  “Do you own a satnav, Dave?” Brody asked.

  Dave had not grown out of his teenage sullenness. “No.”

  “Then it’s pointless saying we should have brought one, isn’t it?”

  “Is that it?” Owen asked.

  A sign for a motorway service station had appeared ahead, all lit up and beaming through the rain like a lighthouse. “That’s it,” Brody said. Owen hit the van’s indicator and it ticked away patiently until they reached the turn-off.

  They cruised the car park looking for a van that matched the photo Jacob had sent to Brody’s phone. Brody had a torch, but he only switched it on when they found a likely candidate.

  With the difficulty seeing through the rain and the concentration they applied to their search, none of the three noticed the absence of people in the car park. If they had, they might have dismissed it, thinking anyone arriving in the car park was likely to get inside as quick as they could. They also did not notice they couldn’t see the motorway any more.

  “That’s it.” Brody’s torch was on a dark blue van. “Good luck for us too, the back end is facing outwards. Owen, go just past it and stop.”

  Brody had an umbrella and, with the practised skill of a middle-aged Englishman, he made it out of the van and under its cover without getting wet. Dave had already opened the back door and leapt outside.

  Brody peered through the rain at the service station. It looked quieter in there than he’d have expected, but all he cared about was that no one was coming their way. He walked round the rear of the van to find Owen, already well on his way to getting drenched, looking into the back.

  “Let’s get to it, lads,” Brody said.

  With one hand on the van’s open back door, Owen looked over his sloped shoulder. “Where’s Dave?”

  Brody aimed his torch beam into the back of the van. Aside from a toolkit and several rolled canvas tarps it was empty. He looked on either side of the van they’d come to break into.

  He wasn’t going to tolerate this level of unprofessional behaviour. He had a reputation as a clean operator and he meant to keep it. He swung back to Owen. “Where the hell is that nephew of yours?”

  There was a blur of movement around Owen. Limbs that moved with boneless fluidity whipped around his arms and legs and torso, limbs that were grey and glistened with their own slime. Before Owen could do more than gasp he was pulled away. Not up, not into the van, not across the car park, but away in some direction Brody didn’t know and couldn’t perceive.

  He stood frozen in shock, staring at the place where Owen had been, unable to think. Panic kicked in after far too many galloping heartbeats. He dropped his umbrella and ran for the driver’s side door.

  He managed three steps.

  Rob waited for Julian to execute the woman he called Laurie.

  He’d been standing there too long and Rob didn’t think he was going to do it. Julian’s mask of determination crumbled as Rob watched.

  Laurie kept screaming and thrashing against the invisible bonds of Julian’s will. Rob had never seen anyone completely lose their cool like that. He wasn’t even sure what language she was hurling at them.

  Rob stepped over to Laurie and clamped one enormous paw over her face. When she tried to bite him, he adjusted his grip to force her jaw shut.

  “I didn’t
much like being maced,” Rob said, “but killing her is, uh, overkill.”

  Julian lowered his arm. His shoulders sagged. “You were going to.”

  Rob shrugged. “I was angry. Do we really have to? You said she’s pregnant. What’s in her?”

  “An abomination that will try to kill us, once it’s ready,” Julian said. “It’s at least partly her already. Listen to her. Ever heard that language?”

  “No.” His ears twitched. “Her breath is kind of burning my hand.”

  “It’s the language, not her breath.” He sighed. “I can’t do it.”

  “Want me to?”

  Julian looked lost for words. Rob realised that he was willing to do it, that somehow his terror of killing an innocent person didn’t apply to her. He wondered if it was because of what Julian had said she was becoming, wondered if he’d sensed it somehow already. Rob was about to ask when an acid pain seared his palm.

  He snatched his hand back. Laurie screamed wordlessly at them. And then, to Rob’s astonishment, her whole body folded inwards and vanished.

  At almost the same instant, the reverse happened and five people appeared around them. Three men and two women, dressed in dishevelled clothing that stank of terror. Their skin was corpse-grey and sweaty. Their eyes were pus-yellow with star-shaped irises and they bulged revoltingly from their faces.

  The five once-human creatures shrieked and the sound drove spikes into Rob’s ears. Before he could recover, the creatures leapt at them. Three of them aimed themselves at Rob.

  He felt himself crash into Julian and send him reeling towards the sinks. The three creatures that were on him were much, much stronger than a human being. They hammered at him with fists and elbows and feet.

  Rob roared. He grabbed one of them and hurled it against the cubicles so hard the creature smashed through the wall, shattering plywood and bone. He ripped his claws through the other two, tearing through papery mortal flesh as if it was rotten cabbage.

  The stench of their body-fluids was like a blow to the face, even to his chemically-seared sense of smell. It was a distillation of everything that was wrong with this place, scooped up and rammed up his nose.

  Instead of blood the creatures had grey ichor. What he at first thought to be organs spilling out of them were not anything that belonged in a human body.

  As the two creatures regained their balance, long grey tentacles shot out of the holes he’d torn in their flesh. They snaked around half-dissolved ribs and burst out of slushy organs. Rob recoiled but they whipped around his arms and he felt dozens of suckers pinching at his skin. The creatures lashed themselves to him and held him in place.

  Lightning exploded in the room and gobbets of flesh rained past Rob. A burnt smell filled the ladies bathroom – they smelled worse dead than alive.

  The two on Rob drove him to his knees, pushing down against the burning muscles in his legs. The third one, the one he’d hurled into the cubicles, came back and jumped on him as well. The creature moved in a boneless parody of walking and even as it struck him, Rob saw its skin splitting to release more grey, slimy tentacles.

  They held him down while he strained against them. One of them climbed on top of him. Its jaw cracked open and feeding proboscis stretched out.

  The sight of it, the thought of being fed upon by such a thing, filled Rob with a greater outrage than he’d ever imagined he could feel. He slammed his arms downwards, propelled his body upwards, caught the creature trying to feed on him with his jaws and tore its head off.

  They tasted worse than they smelled, but Rob was too angry to notice.

  He twisted his body, lifted the creature on his right clear off the ground and slammed it into the one on his left. He ripped into the shoulder of one with his teeth. Stingers plunged into his flesh from both creatures, but their toxins didn’t make a dent in his rage.

  He made it to his feet. He ran at the far wall and smashed both creatures into the tiles. The one on his right arm fell away, mewling in pain. Rob grabbed the one on his left and grey ichor squelched out of it as his clawed fingers sank into its flesh. He felt something harder inside, like an organ. He took a grip on it and tore the creature apart.

  The other one, still moved – feebly. Rob picked it up and slammed it head-first into the floor so hard the tiles exploded. The creature’s body compressed to about half its length and dark grey fluid shot out its sides.

  Rob roared and turned to find the rest of them.

  Two lumps of blackening flesh sizzled in front of Julian, who had backed into the corner. Blue flame wreathed both piles of body parts. Julian held his left hand out and little arcs of lightning still flickered around his glove. With his right hand he dug through his bag.

  Rob breathed fast and hard. The rage still stormed inside him and he began to rein it in, slow it down.

  He saw Julian was shaking.

  “Hurt?” Rob asked. His voice was a long way from human.

  “It’s under control,” Julian said.

  He took a glass vial about as long as a finger from his bag. The top popped off of its own accord and rattled on the tiled floor. Julian poured the contents in his mouth and grimaced as he swallowed.

  “What was that?”

  “Got stung.” Julian held up his arm and Rob saw blood on his sleeve. “The antidote will take care of it though. I always carry some. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  He still looked pale and shaky, but Rob left it there. He kicked at one of the chunks of semi-human flesh on the floor. “Are these the people who were here? Is this what Laurie is turning into?”

  Julian nodded. “A probing attack, I think.”

  “Where are the rest?” Rob asked. “Where do we find them?” He flexed his long fingers.

  Julian pulled himself out of the corner. Squaring his shoulders, he moved to where Laurie had vanished with the care of someone testing his legs. His right hand reached into the space where she’d stood.

  The air sizzled and bubbled.

  “The portal hasn’t faded,” he said. “I can take us through.” He shook himself. “There will be a lot of them on the other side. Are you ready for this?”

  Rob stepped up alongside him. “Do it.”

  The air, heavy with slow-moving particles, flowed around them in swirls of brown and yellow. The room resembled the room they’d just left, but its walls were slanted and the distance to them kept swaying back and forth. Beneath their feet, the tiles rattled and chattered. Yellow fluid stained the sinks and sickly fronds wavered up out of them. The mirrors were a black, tarry sludge. Broad, gulping sounds came from the toilet stalls.

  “What is this?” Rob asked.

  “A construct,” Julian said. “A dream place halfway between the real world and formless chaos, and made of both. Look below.”

  He still had his hand on Rob’s arm. He had placed it there without any hesitation, as if grabbing the furred arm of a towering werewolf was not usually lethal. The action stuck in Rob’s mind.

  He felt the brush of Julian’s thoughts and his scent, human and electric, sharpened in Rob’s senses.

  The floor vanished and Rob looked down into an abyss of space scattered with ancient stars. They appeared and vanished around a void directly beneath Rob and he realised a vast shape, rippling with cancerous life, was close and growing closer.

  An eye opened in the void. It was an infected yellow, with a star-shaped iris, and it glowed from within with the light of dying galaxies. “I’ve seen that before,” Rob said.

  The vision faded. The floor lay beneath them again. The tiles crawled sideways like crabs, edging away from their feet. From the nearest cubicle, a grey organ like a boil-covered tongue slurped at the air.

  “You have?”

  “This cult called it up,” Rob said. “They tried to sacrifice me to it so I killed them all.”

  Julian nodded. “That’s the best thing to do with a cult like that. They must have been larger than the group you saw though.”

  “
So this is my fault.”

  Julian adjusted his glove. “Well, I wasn’t going to say it.”

  A single inhuman voice raised a blood-freezing howl. A dozen more voices answered it. Rob flinched, then roared back at them.

  He ran to the door and when it tried to become a wall he crashed through it. Outside lay a twisted reflection of the service station restaurant area. The light was worse here, phosphorescent green as well as yellow and brown, and the air threatened to clot in Rob’s nose. The cookers in the food shops huffed out hot, wet breaths of foul air. Chairs with legs as tall as Rob skittered about in small herds. Magazines flapped in a circle near the ceiling and cawed in cracked imitations of female voices.

  The missing service station customers and staff were all there. They were wretched, ruined things. Some lay on the floor, twitching and moaning, while others lurched amongst the ambling chairs and flexing tables. In some the only signs of aberration were grey skin and protruding eyes. Others had rippling bulges in their flesh as whatever grew within them prepared to tear loose.

  In the centre of the seating area rose a tall mass that would not, at first, become a single shape to Rob’s eyes. It was a man, then a dozen men overlapping but scattered through the arcs of different movements and gestures. It was a grey and boneless shape, bulging and contracting as it breathed out the foul, particulate mist that stung Rob’s nose and eyes.

  Through all its changes, at its peak were the head and shoulders of a man in a coat, wearing wrap-around sunglasses.

  It opened its mouth and shrieked again. The human hosts – or the creatures incubating within them – screeched in reply.

  They turned towards Rob and Julian and attacked.

  Rob didn’t wait to see if Julian was with him. He threw himself into the creatures. His claws shredded rotten human flesh and ripped apart the grey things within them. He lunged forward with his teeth and tore off limbs and heads. He picked them up bodily, hurled them across the room or used them to batter each other into messy puddles. They leapt over the tables and stabbed him with stingers, wrapped tentacles around him and tore at his flesh, but an endless well of outrage sprang up from inside him and he barely felt any of it.