The Book of Death (2 page)

At four a.m. two figures roamed
the ghost-like streets. The young couple stayed mostly in the shadows. The
girl, aged in her early twenties, wore jeans and a grey sweatshirt. The
bloodstains on the front looked black in the darkness. The blood was mostly her
own, dribbled there from a wound in her neck which she hid well beneath her
long dark hair. Her partner, a male of similar age, was the cause of the wound.
He’d transformed her into a creature of the night like himself just after
midnight.

Since then they had traipsed
across town and had just spent several minutes in the shadows outside the
police station, the scene of some of the night’s more unpleasant carnage,
checking for signs of any life inside.

The male, Dante Vittori,
eventually stepped out of the shadows and into the light that shone down from
the streetlights. The lights showed up the heavy bloodstains on his light blue
police officer’s shirt that hung untucked over a pair of dark blue pants. He
gestured to his partner to join him. The police station looked totally desolate
and unoccupied. Dante walked unashamedly towards it, secure in the knowledge
that anything that might be lurking nearby would not dare harm him. His
girlfriend Kacy slipped from the shadows and chased after him.

‘I’m not convinced this is the
best place to be right now,’ she called out to him as he made his way up the
concrete steps that led to the glass double doors at the front of the station.

‘Trust me,’ he said, pushing the
glass door on the right open. ‘There’s something here you’re gonna like.’ He
peered around the door to check if anyone was around.

Kacy wasn’t convinced. ‘Unless
it’s a cure to turn us back to normal I doubt I’m gonna like it.’

‘Come on. There’s no one here,’
said Dante waving her in through the door as he held it open for her.

Kacy stepped inside and waited
for him to lead the way. The reception area inside the station was a mess. And
eerily quiet. Dante headed towards an elevator on the far side of the
reception, past several unmanned desks. Blood covered the desks, walls and much
of the floor around the reception area. The corpse of a police officer lay on
the floor by the right hand wall.
 
The top half of his head was missing.

‘I wonder what happened to him?’
Kacy asked, stepping clear of the body.

‘The monk Peto knocked him out.’

‘The monk who had his head cut
off earlier?’

‘Yeah, Peto. He was a good guy.’

‘I hope the cops find the person
who cut his head off.’

‘I bet they don’t even find the
head.’

Kacy frowned as she stared at
the corpse on the floor. ‘How did knocking this guy out leave him in this
state?’

‘After Peto knocked him out, the
Bourbon Kid shot him in the back of the head to make sure he didn’t wake up.’

‘Nice,’ said Kacy, taking one
last look at the body before following Dante over to the elevator. ‘Where
exactly is the Kid now? Can we find him? Would he help us?’

Dante shook his head. ‘Nah. The
Monk used the Eye of the Moon to help the Kid get his soul back or something.
It turned him all queer and then he just drove off and left us.’

‘Asshole.’

‘Yeah. I wouldn’t call him that
to his face though.’

Dante pressed a button in the
wall by the elevator to call it up to their floor. As the gears of the elevator
began to churn, Kacy became aware of a foul stench in the air.

‘What on earth is that smell?’
she asked.

‘Shit.’

‘What?’

‘That smell is shit.’

The elevator made a pinging
noise and the doors opened, revealing an elevator carriage with walls covered
in blood and shit.

‘Oh my God,’ Kacy put her hand
over her mouth and reeled back, not just at the shock of the sight but also at
the stink.

‘See,’ said Dante pointing at
some of the browner patches. ‘
Shit
. Kid rammed a shotgun up a cop’s ass
and blew his guts out. Shit went everywhere. Real nasty.’

‘Can we take the stairs?’ Kacy
asked.

Dante stepped into the elevator
and pressed a button on the keypad on the right hand side.

‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘It’s
just shit. And blood.’ He glanced at a spot on the floor out of Kacy’s eye
line, before adding, ‘and a testicle by the looks of it. Real hairy one.’

‘I’m taking the stairs,’ said
Kacy. ‘What floor are you going to?’

‘Basement.’

‘See you there.’

The elevator doors closed and
Kacy hurried over to a door on the right that led to a flight of stairs. She
rushed down them and arrived in the basement a good few seconds before the
elevator.

The basement was a disused
locker room. It had seen better days and was in need of some serious
modernisation and a good clean up. There were several long wooden benches
nailed to the walls with unlocked grey metal sports lockers above them. The
floor was covered in blood (similar to the floor in the reception area above)
and black burn marks. And much like the elevator, the place stank of shit and
death. The walls too, were stained with a ridiculous amount of blood. Dried
blood though, not the kind that would satisfy the lusting that Kacy was
beginning to feel. The sight of it made her incredibly hungry.

The elevator made another
pinging sound, the doors parted and Dante stepped out. He looked around at his
surroundings.

‘Why are we here?’ Kacy asked.

‘There’s something here you
might like. Or certainly need anyway.’

‘Like what? A dirty jockstrap?’
asked Kacy looking around once more at the foul locker room.

Dante kissed her on the cheek
then walked past her to a row of lockers on the wall. He peered along the floor
beneath the wooden bench that ran beneath the lockers. About two thirds of the
way down the wall, maybe twenty lockers along, he leaned down and scoured the
floor beneath the bench. He reached beneath it and pulled out a package that
had previously been concealed from view. He turned around and grinned at Kacy.
Two of his top teeth slowly extended into tiny fangs.

‘What’s that?’ Kacy asked
pointing at the package in his hands.

‘Catch.’

He threw the package towards
her. As it flew through the air Kacy realised it was a bag of liquid. Dark
liquid. She caught it competently. Once it was in her hands she soon realised
she was holding a fairly hefty bag of blood. The mere sight of it set her pulse
racing. She felt her own vampire fangs grow a little in length. An urge came
over her, an almost uncontrollable urge. Suddenly without giving it a second
thought she lifted the bag up to her mouth and used her razor sharp teeth to
rip it open. She began to pour the blood recklessly into her mouth. Much of it missed
its target and dribbled down her face. But every single ounce that slid down
her throat brought on a sensation like nothing she had ever known. A feeling of
pure adrenaline raced through her bloodstream and she became lost in her inner
self. She closed her eyes and let the feeling of power and lust flow through
her body. For a brief time she felt at one with the universe, yet oblivious to
everything around her, until she felt Dante’s hand grab hers.

‘Hey, save some for me,’ she
heard him say.

She opened her eyes and took a
deep breath. Dante took the bag of blood from her. Like her, once the blood was
in his hands his self-control seemed to vanish. He poured some into his own
gaping mouth. Kacy saw that he too was experiencing the same orgasmic feeling that
she had just enjoyed.

After finishing off the remains
of the bag, Dante stood still, breathing slowly and blinking. He had a look of
extreme pleasure on his face, the likes of which Kacy had never seen before.
She then became aware of the fact that she had a huge beaming smile across her
own face. Maybe being a vampire wasn’t so bad after all.

‘That was awesome, wasn’t it?’
she said.

‘Incredible,’ said Dante. ‘I
mean, when I bit you and turned you into a vampire earlier, I drank some of
your blood, but it was
nothing
like this. No offence, babe.’

‘None taken.’

‘That shit was better than
heroin,’ Dante said.

‘When did you ever try heroin?’

‘I didn’t. I’m just saying.’

Kacy wiped her finger across her
cheek and licked up a small dribble of blood. ‘Where did this blood come from?’
she asked. ‘We should get some more of it.’

Dante shrugged. ‘We just found
it down here earlier. One of the vampires the Bourbon Kid killed had it in his
pocket. We just chucked it under the lockers. Never thought I’d be drinking it
a few hours later.’

Kacy looked at the bag and
noticed that there was a white sticker on it that had remained intact in spite
of her ripping the bag open with her teeth.

‘What’s that sticker say?’ she
asked, pointing at it.

Dante unravelled the bag and
took a look at the sticker. It was a label with some black typed lettering on
it.

‘It says it’s the blood of
someone called Archibald Somers,’ Dante said with another shrug of his
shoulders.

‘Archibald Somers,’ said Kacy.
‘I recognise that name. Who was he?’

‘No idea, but I could drink the
guy’s blood all day. I’ve never felt anything like this. How about you?’

Kacy agreed. ‘I feel incredible.
Where can we get some more?’

Dante appeared to be deep in thought
for a moment, which was unusual for him. Deep thoughts and Dante weren’t two
things normally associated with each other. Eventually he spoke up. ‘I think I
know a place,’ he said.

‘Really? Where?’

‘It’s the nightclub, The Swamp.
Vanity, the leader of the Shades clan, owns it. He could help us out. He might
even have some blood there that we can drink.’

‘Can we trust him?’

‘I think so. I mean, I’m already
part of his clan. The rest of the Shades got killed, so he'll probably be
pleased to see me, especially now I have you. He might be grateful I’ve brought
him a new recruit.’

‘But will he know that you
teamed up with the Bourbon Kid and the monk last night?’

‘Only one way to find out. Let’s
go see him.’

Kacy looked at her watch. ‘It’s
well past four o’clock,’ she said. ‘Do we need to worry about the sun coming
up?’

‘No. The sun always comes up,
doesn’t it?’

‘That’s not what I meant you
idiot. I mean, if we’re outside when the sun comes up are we going to melt or
something like that?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Then let’s get a move on!’

They hurried back up the stairs
to the reception area. It was still eerily quiet up there and thankfully still
dark outside. As they sidestepped their way through the blood and mess on the
floor on their way out, a face appeared at the glass double doors at the
entrance. It was the terrified face of a young boy, no more than eight years
old. He banged hard on the glass doors and appeared to scream something like “
Help
me!”

Before either Dante or Kacy
could react, a second figure appeared behind the boy, swooping out of the
darkness. It grabbed him around the waist and dragged him back away from the
doors. A second later the boy and his much larger assailant had vanished.

‘Fuck me,’ said Dante. ‘Did that
really just happen?’

Kacy tried to process the image
in her head. It had happened so fast. ‘Did you see who that was that grabbed
the boy?’ she asked.

Dante nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s some
fucked up shit. I guess we’re not the only vampires out at this time of night.’

‘Have you seen that guy before?’

‘Yeah, but only with you, and he
wasn’t a vampire then.’

Two

Beth woke from her gentle slumber.
Her bed was warm and cosy. Warmer than usual because she had shared it with JD,
finally reunited after eighteen years apart. She couldn’t remember ever waking
up feeling so happy. She had allowed him to fall asleep before her simply
because she had been so happy to just stare at him, knowing that it was real
that he had come back to her. She rubbed her eyes and rolled over to look at
him again. The duvet on the other side of the bed had been pulled back.

 
JD was gone.

Her
heart missed a beat. Had it all been a dream? Had he really reappeared at the
end of the pier where she was waiting? Where she’d waited every Halloween night
all those years?

She
thought hard. Her head felt fuzzy and she was still coming to terms with waking
up so early. The curtains were drawn and it was still dark outside. She reached
over and felt the bed where the duvet had been pulled back. It was still warm.
She decided she couldn’t have dreamt it. It wasn’t possible. The whole thing
had been so real, right down to the moment when she had fallen asleep in his
arms.

She
spied a small piece of brown cloth resting on the pillow on the other side of
the bed. She grabbed it and held it up in front of her face to get a good look
at it. Sewn into the centre of it was a dark red heart. In the centre of the
heart in blue letters were the initials JD. It was a relief to know she wasn’t
going crazy. This was the proof she needed to confirm that the previous night
hadn’t been a dream. But what was the significance of the cloth? Did it mean
he’d left? Was it a goodbye note of some kind?