His Vampyrrhic Bride (26 page)

‘Bolter, please don’t say these things. You’re making me worried.’

‘Wait.’ His voice rose as excitement blazed through him. ‘I actually
can
explain that crucial stage in crappy Tom Westonby’s life. That stage is called the
Death Stage
!’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Oooh, you sound frightened now, you bitch.’ He pointed across the floodwater. ‘Do you see Chester Kenyon’s workshop? Well, you can only see the roof because the rest is underwater.’

‘What of it?’

Even from here he could see dread in her eyes. The woman knew she was going to hear terrible news. Bolter rubbed his belly with happiness.

‘Bolter,
what is it about the workshop
?’

‘I locked Chester and Tom into a room there. Look, it’s all flooded up to the roof.’ His voice soared into a shriek. ‘They’ve both drowned, you bitch! Tom’s floating there . . . and he’s all like this.’ Bolter opened his mouth and eyes wide, pretending to be a floating corpse.

Nicola Bekk stood there. She’d gone stiff as a timber post.

He laughed at her. ‘Don’t you get it? I’ve got more brains than they have. I trapped them in a little room. Then the flood came and, hey presto, they both drowned. Can you imagine how scared they were? Water’s coming in. They’re panicking. “Oh! Who will save us? Will I ever see Nicola Bekk again?” Then . . . glug, glug, glug. Tom Westonby is dead. I had the balls to kill him!’

Bolter wanted tears, screams and grief. Then he’d go across there . . . console her in his own full-on, man-on-bitch kinda way.

But no.

She stood there – stiff as a post planted in concrete. Her face didn’t have a shred of emotion. Her eyes stared, though they didn’t really stare at him. Or at anything. Unless you really can stare at literally nothing.

Then something happened. Something strange enough to make even the drug-hyper Bolter clear-headed.

Just for a second, the colour went out of his surroundings. The yellow glitter fled from the floodwaters. The red roofs of the houses faded to brown. The deep blue of the sky turned a deathly grey. Just for that extraordinary second, all the colours seemed to fly towards Nicola Bekk. They flowed into her. She sucked all the vibrant hues of the world into her body, leaving a bleached ghost of a village.

The transformation only did last for a second. Because suddenly the colours were back – the red roofs; the golden shimmer of water at twilight; the deep blue sky.

That’s when all hell broke loose.

The water exploded in front of Bolter. He was so startled that he very nearly toppled backwards off the wall.

Because he’d seen what surged up from the floodwaters. This was the same creature that had attacked him and his pals at Mull-Rigg Hall: the ugly animal that consisted of human heads and limbs; a nightmare weave of corpses.

He stared into the mass of heads with their open mouths and white, staring eyes. He recognized the faces of Pug, Grafty and Nix. They glared at him, their expressions combining horror and a frantic hunger. They wanted him. They wanted him to be part of this thing.

The creature’s limbs acted like dozens of flippers, propelling its massive body towards the wall.

The creature wanted him. Bolter was its target – no doubting that.

As soon as the beast reached the wall, hands were suddenly reaching out in order to drag him into the water. He heard the hissing sound the thing made. Each mouth whispered its hungry need for him. Droplets splashed his face.

The cold shock snapped him out of that paralysis of horror. Bolter ran. There was deep water to the right and to the left of him. The creature sped along the submerged street to his left. The thing swam with only its uppermost part exposed to the air. The bulk of it lay underwater. The churning and thrashing of its limbs created waves that slammed against the brickwork – and it moved FAST.

Bolter screamed to Nicola Bekk, ‘Call it off! Call it off!’ Deep down, he absolutely knew she controlled it. He also knew that she demanded vengeance. He’d left her boyfriend to drown in the workshop. Now she’d unleashed the beast.

He charged along the wall that ran like a causeway through the flood. The top of the wall was barely a foot wide – a brick tightrope of a thing: so one misstep; one momentary loss of balance; one slippery patch of moss . . . Then he’d plunge into the water.

He wouldn’t be able to outswim the monster. The sound of his pals’ snapping bones came back to him. He remembered their screams of pain. Now the heads of Pug, Grafty and Nix adorned the monster. They were part of it. They’d become living components of that nightmare beast.

Bolter relied on the drugs he’d been gulping down to make him run faster.
They don’t call this stuff SPEED for nothing.
Even so, the rushing sound of that thing cutting through the water grew louder. He shot a glance back at Nicola. She stared at him with a trance stare. No emotion. No recognition. Just an eerie blankness as she watched the thug that had killed Tom Westonby being hunted down by the monster.

Bolter had reached a cluster of outbuildings in a flooded yard. These lay on the other side of the wall from the monster. Spray from its thrashing limbs drenched him as it closed in. Another second and it would drag him from the wall. After that, it would hold him down underwater where it could really start to work on him.

When Bolter glimpsed a domestic garage through the spray, he did not hesitate. He leapt from the wall. Seconds later, he crashed through its brittle roof.

And he really did hope, with all his amphetamine-driven heart, that the monster wouldn’t find him there.

T
om Westonby parked the car in an area of high ground. The last bit of daylight was dying. Darkness swept down the valley: a second flood that slowly began to hide what remained of the village.

For a moment, he sat there beside Nicola’s mother in the car. She calmly watched the village that she both feared and despised lying there in the grip of the River Lepping. Houses had become little individual islands. Probably, at least half the homes in the village were up to their roofs in those dark waters. The river had done a thorough job of invading the place. Streets resembled canals. Even in this gloom, he could make out the oblong shapes of cars that floated on the current like the bodies of dead whales.

Mrs Bekk spoke with a clear sense of purpose: ‘We’ll split up to look for Nicola. You head down there by the water’s edge while I search the high ground. Nicola was worried about you. She knows how dangerous the floods can be, so she’ll be determined to make sure that you’re safe. Nicola won’t give up until she finds you.’

‘That thug, Bolter, will be looking for her, too.’

‘You can take care of him, can’t you?’

‘He doesn’t scare me. But what happens if you meet him? The power’s out. There are no street lights working.’

‘That young man doesn’t frighten me, Tom. I’m only frightened of what he might do to my daughter.’

‘I’ve got a flashlight. You best take that.’

The white-haired woman shook her head. ‘I’ve lived out there in the forest since I was born. Starlight’s ample for me. You take it.’

So, that’s how it went. Tom pulled the flashlight from the back of the car as they prepared to go their separate ways.

Mrs Bekk had something to tell Tom first. The note of warning in her voice made his blood run cold.

‘Tom,’ she began, ‘I’ve told you that you must break off this relationship with my daughter.’

‘And I’ve told you I will never do that.’

‘Then I’m going to give you a warning.’ Her voice was calm; she obviously wanted him to understand some important facts. ‘Even though you deny that you’ve seen Nicola’s brothers and sisters that doesn’t alter the truth. They did go into the outside world, Tom. They thought they could turn their backs on their family’s heritage.’

‘Somehow you hypnotized me. There’s no such thing as vampires.’

‘You might not believe the evidence of your own eyes. But it’s Nicola’s fate to become a vampire if you don’t stop seeing her.’

‘You’ll have to do better than that to stop us getting married.’

‘We both want to find Nicola as soon as possible. She’s in danger out there.’ The woman nodded towards the drowned village. ‘So I’m not going to waste time trying to persuade you to believe in my family’s gods or the curse that’s made us prisoners of this valley. However, you need to watch my daughter for signs of the change.’

‘What signs?’ He tried to sound contemptuous of her suggestion that Nicola would transform in some way. Even so, shivers cascaded down his back. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Watch her closely for symptoms. What you’ll notice first is that Nicola’s personality will gradually change. Then the colour will go from her skin. Keep watching her eyes. The blue will fade from them. As her skin turns completely white . . . as white as milk . . . her veins will become black, especially on the neck. They’ll look like black tattoos.’

Her pale blue eyes fixed on his. There was sadness there and a certainty of the tragedy to come. She could have been telling him that someone he loved had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness . . . and –
hush
– the village was so silent: he could hear the morbid thud . . . thud . . . thud of his own heart.

Being in the presence of this eerie woman had the power to separate him from the real world. Once again he felt that he had entered a realm where not only the impossible might just happen
but also that it would become inevitable
.

He took a deep breath. Was it some form of hypnosis, or had his brain suffered actual damage when he was attacked by Bolter and his crew? Tom’s unease grew as he found himself starting to believe Mrs Bekk’s strange story. He tried to find a flaw in what she’d told him. ‘Your other sons and daughters . . . Why hasn’t Nicola mentioned them to me?’

‘She doesn’t even know they exist. They transformed before she was born. I keep their existence a secret from her. As with Helsvir, she only encounters them when she’s in a state of trance.’

‘So why don’t they harm her?’

‘They understand that she is of the same blood. Her brothers and sisters wouldn’t hurt her.’ All of a sudden she fiercely gripped his arm and jutted her face forward to within six inches of his. ‘Remember what I told you,’ she hissed. ‘Watch for the symptoms. The colour will leave Nicola’s skin. Her eyes will turn white . . . completely white, apart from the pupils. I’m warning you, Tom. It will be terrible to watch the change taking place. There’ll be nothing you can do to stop it happening.
It’s like watching a death.
’ With that, she quickly walked away into the dark.

After taking a dozen steps or so, he realized that they’d not arranged any way of signalling to each other. How would they communicate if they did find Nicola? Maybe, however, Mrs Bekk had already reached a conclusion in that delusional mind of hers: that Nicola faced the grim transformation whatever the outcome of the search
.

It’s like watching a death.
The woman’s phrase echoed in his ears as he headed towards the flooded village. He’d never felt so alone in his life.

Tom didn’t switch on the flashlight. If Bolter saw the light, it would warn him that someone else had entered an otherwise deserted village. Right now, Tom’s survival instinct whispered
danger . . . danger.
His safety might depend on Bolter not knowing his whereabouts.

A village engulfed by a river that had broken through its levee was a threatening place to begin with. Right now, he sensed more dangers lurking down there. Bolter for sure. And maybe something from his nightmares – something monstrous with those strange dead-alive faces. Even though he could rationally disbelieve in the existence of monsters, a far less rational aspect of his mind whispered just the opposite:
when you’re alone in the dark, ghosts and primordial creatures of the night start to seem utterly real.

The smell of wetness filled his nostrils. A cold breeze played on his face – the breath from dead lungs . . . or lungs that
should
have died long ago.

Already, the very fact of being here alone at night, in a village that had its heart drowned by the river, started to act on his imagination. So easy now to picture a rotting hand bursting out of the pavement to grab hold of his ankle, or ghostly figures gliding out from the alleyways.

Tom glanced up at the sky. Black. An oppressive black. Dense cloud had come rolling in to block out the stars. His thumb found the raised switch of the flashlight.
No, don’t use it yet. Conserve the batteries. And, more importantly, don’t let anyone . . . or anything . . . know that you’re here.
He walked down a steeply sloping lane with cottages at either side. They appeared as blocks of shadow in the darkness. Of course, there were no lights behind the windows. The electricity supply had failed when the river gushed into the substation. What added to the sense of abandonment was that residents on the higher ground had been evacuated, too. Perhaps the authorities feared that the flood would creep even higher?

Tom soon reached the edge of the flood. Small waves lapped just inches from his toes as he looked along a street. The liquid acted like a mirror, catching phantom reflections of the fronts of houses. That was the moment it struck him how difficult his search for Nicola would be
. How am I going to find her in this maze of flooded roads? What if Bolter found her and is holding her somewhere? After all, he locked Chester and me in the storeroom.

‘Nicola?’ he called gently into the dark, yawning mouth of an alleyway. ‘Nicola?’

The only reply, the faint lapping of floodwaters. Strangely, a sound like someone blowing kisses.

Tom took a deep breath
. Come on. Use your head. Plan this like a diving expedition. Figure out what you’re going to do. Then do it!
After all, he couldn’t simply wander aimlessly in the hope of bumping into her.

Nicola had striking blonde hair. He remembered how it resembled a flame in the gloom. So he should be able to see her even in this small amount of light. Above him, a glow filtered through the cloud.