Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (12 page)

Nisha was the trigger for this.

It was his revenge against Nisha transposed onto
Ildico.

Ildico deserves better. Nisha deserved to be punished,
not Ildico.

Ildico is wonderful.

----- X -----

Ildico
sensually tortured him all day, always hovering just off-stage, ready to
interject herself onto whatever he was trying to work on. Despite the torment
he’d managed to be productive. Inspiration spilled onto the wall panels. This
morning’s visit to the forest, the crazy person in camouflage and the
uncontrollable fantasies all had a place. Stick to what you know, his tutors
had always said; after today he knew how it felt to be stalked, soaked,
threatened and seduced. The little fantasies of Ildico were transposed onto
fictional women who he was more comfortable abusing with his mind. The spider
vampires were in the mix and looking good. The idea of men searching the
forests for a missing girl, even a mysterious force that could be identified as
the Shadowbeast had a cameo. There weren’t any narratives or plot lines yet but
a few characters were coming to life and action scenes appeared that were
looking for a story to be a part of. There was a complex prison escape inspired
by the basement to the block that was looking good and a fabulous wicked-witch
type character who sensuously placed plague-ridden ticks onto the skin of bound
and naked teenaged boys. All in all the universe was growing, it fitted the
brief and it was a fun place to visit.

He ended the day drinking red wine and listening to
music. Ideas sloshed around drunkenly as he made his way to bed. He was
thinking of being chased in the forest. He was thinking of semi-naked women in
bondage scenarios, ideas of mythical monsters and insidious humans in a
landscape that would be terrifying if real but entertaining to read about. He lay
in bed with all of these motifs drifting through his consciousness. His final
thought was a warm and arousing sensation of Ildico in the bed with him,
straddling him, making love gently.

And then he fell asleep.

----- X -----

There
was no lighting on the stairwell, he was clicking the timed light switch but it
made nothing but a click. He stepped back into the apartment and searched for
the flashlight he’d bought. There was no power in the apartment either. Another
blackout no doubt, but it wasn’t entirely dark. Edges seemed to be highlighted
in a delicate blue hue; a laser’s edge to everything from an unknown source.
The flashlight threw a pure straight beam of cool white light in a narrow arc
and it picked out the details, but the blue edging made the stairwell
navigable.

Paul descended carefully, holding on to the handrail,
not so much to keep himself upright but more to find his way. There were six
floors to wind down and doing it in darkness would be treacherous. He noticed
there was a breath of wind, a draught blowing into the stairwell from
somewhere; when he listened intently, it sounded like breathing, like that
sound he’d heard from the basement.

The basement... he should check it whilst nobody was
around.

On the ground floor Paul examined the steel door
leading to the lower level. It was unlocked; perhaps it was never locked. It
swung inwards easily with a squeal of rubbing metal. He wished it had opened
silently, he wished that he could just explore and be silent and invisible.

He descended the concrete stairs gingerly feeling the
air change to that same still and frozen atmosphere he’d experienced in the
early morning forest. The moment he touched both feet onto the ground something
caught his eye, a sparkle, some distance ahead of him. Something on the floor
that seemed to twinkle in the beam of the flashlight.

He walked to it almost holding his breath, somehow
feeling it important to remain as quiet as possible. Before he even bent down
to the shining object he knew what it was. The cross, the little silver cross
that had been tied around the wrist of a buried man. He crouched to examine and
found it still had the rough twine threaded through one end.

As he turned it in his fingers there was a subtle
shift in the atmosphere as though he’d tripped some invisible alarm. He clicked
off the flashlight and remained crouched in darkness. It was then he realised
what the change had been. The basement was not highlighted in the blue light of
the staircase; down here it was ruby red. The glow was strange, ethereal,
mysterious; he couldn’t tell where the light source came from. Edges seemed to
glow from within, drawing just enough of an outline to show the location. It
was the same concrete basement, the same heavy bulkhead doors lining the walls.
It should have been pitch black, yet somehow it was alive with a warmth of
barely perceptible red light that was part real and part imagined.

The atmosphere was breathing, exhaling, blowing a
sickly human breath along the corridor which set something moving above him.
Lined in that barely perceptible red edging Paul saw what it was. Crucifixes,
hundreds of them, hanging down from the dirty pipes that were suspended from
the ceiling. The first was the cruciform, the silver figurine of Christ that
guarded the entrance to the shrine in the forest; that cruciform was here now,
in the basement hell signifying the start of a trail that whispered to be
followed.

Follow the trail, follow the crucifixes.

The trail of crosses ended after many turns and twists
of the corridor. The final one was wide and flat with a painted image of Christ
the likes of which he had never seen. Jesus was falling from the cross, the
spear wound to the side had caused evisceration and his intestines spilled in a
jumble of biology from the wound, his right hand had ripped free from the nail
and pointed away. When Paul followed the gaze of Jesus and the pointing finger
he saw they pointed to a gap in the wall. It was narrow, perhaps only eighteen
inches wide, but when Paul shone the flashlight into the space he saw it opened
into a new chamber. Jesus had shown him the way.

Paul pressed through into a space that was barely four
feet wide. Another corridor with walls that looked charred or soot covered with
the alligator-skin texture of burnt wood.

He slipped; it was only a slight skid, but there was
something on the floor. Under the cold stare of the flashlight beam he saw that
the floor was glistening with blood. There was flesh of some kind too, greasy
and wet, like the spilled intestines of Christ. Caution took control of his
movements. Don’t fall over as you follow this blood trail, don’t fall into it.

With the beam angled down, Paul followed the trail of
injury further until the corridor widened out into a chamber, the walls of
which were too distant and wrapped in darkness to be seen. The only sensation
to the size of the chamber was the sound of his footsteps which were echoing
longer and longer as the darkness enlarged.

The white cross that marked the grave of a vampire. It
was here, in the centre. This was the point he was searching for. He walked to
it with firm strides, hearing his footsteps now reverberate as though he were
in a great mausoleum.

The cross seemed to be lit from a pinhole of light
coming from an imperceptibly high ceiling. He knew this was the goal, the end
of the journey and after taking a deep breath he reached out a hand and touched
it.

“I’m here,” he said. “I’m ready. Show me what it is
you want me to see.”

The sensation of movement. Sounds. The slow-motion
groans of ancient machinery coming to life. The cross remained glowing in its
pin-spot of white light but from high above came a soft arc of ruby red. It
started at the ceiling and spread out and down, illuminating the space and
showing its shape. It was a dome of some kind. The walls were decorated in what
appeared to be wooden panels that contained classical paintings. He saw the
sacred heart painting of Christ from the living room. He saw the disembowelled
Jesus falling from the cross. He saw a painting of a girl being raped by a man
with goat horns growing from his head. He saw a painting of a man hanging from
a noose, again with his bowels hanging between his eviscerated abdomen and the
floor. There were images of ancient surgery carried out with long fine blades.
There was a castration as old men with beards sliced off the testicles of a
young boy to make him a eunuch. There was another image of the wicked queen
from his story biting into the severed testicle of a baby boy as though it were
an olive. There were orgies of sexual violence in every single picture and in
pride of place was Ildico; she stood naked like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, a
perfect beauty emerged from a clamshell, but this painting had no cherubs
bringing clothes for her to dress, rather it had wolves viewing her as a meal.
It had creatures of blood lust thirsting for her. Only her radiant purity was
keeping them at bay. In this gallery of filth and degradation, she was the only
chink of light.

“You are purity, Ildico,” Paul said. “Nothing must
happen to you, else darkness will consume us all.”

The light in the chamber lowered in brightness but
intensified in colour; womb red sucking the details from the paintings away
until they were barely visible. Everything was fading away.

But then Paul realised there was something else here.
The picture of Ildico’s perfection was part of the mystery, but it was only one
side to the coin. It was the nice side, the pleasantness. There was something
else in here that was the darkness, the insidious, a thing that was consuming
the heat in the air, the very warmth of his humanity.

Paul saw it.

Standing by the edge of the dome was a... it was hard
to explain or rationalise even as he looked at it... it was the shape of a man
but there was no form. Like a living silhouette, or a shadow. This thing didn’t
fill any physical space, rather it was empty space, void, it was an emptiness
that pulled inwards, sucking the life from the atmosphere and replacing it with
a coldness. It looked like a man, but it wasn’t flesh; it was a three
dimensional shadow.

The thing stared at Paul for a moment, then leaned
forward, stretching its arms out, splaying long dark fingers that ended in
points. A soft glow caught the edge of its eye sockets which for an instant
flickered like fire.

It’s coming to life, Paul thought.

The being suddenly cracked all across its body.
Hairline, whisper fine cracks that showed a fire of ruby red flames within. It
was as though the man were coated in the blackest of paints, but those cobwebs
of cracks running over his body showed a crimson fire burning inside the black
shell.

Then it opened its eyes. Glaring, luminous red eyes
that spoke a language of ruthless violence. Its stance dropped lower like a
runner on the starting blocks. The chest expanded to take a breath which it
blew out with a sickly smell and that same sound of a breath that he’d heard
before.

It was going to attack. The posture, the attitude,
this thing that was forming, was preparing to unleash a rush of violence.

Paul backed away. He spun around with the flashlight
looking for the exit to the dome. He saw it and moved back faster. He heard
that exhaled breath again, more fiercely as the creature purged. The breath
came like a snarl, with force, he felt it on the back of his neck.

Without knowing how it had happened he was running.
His feet thundering back along the inclined passageway back to the basement
corridor. He felt constricted, as though his chest was bound with ropes that
made it hard to breathe. He knew the monster was behind him and without looking
he could tell it had started to run. It was the camouflaged thing in the forest
chasing him again, but this time, he knew there would be no escape.
Instinctively, he knew that his evasion in the forest had only postponed the
inevitable.

He never saw it when it caught him. It hit his back
like a shotgun blast, throwing him forward and crashing him to the floor. He
felt the slicing razor fingers that tore through the clothes across his
shoulders. He felt its claws sink into his flesh and rip the skin away. He
tried to scream but couldn’t inhale, the thing was on his back, pressing him
into the floor too heavily. He felt everything, the way it crunched the
vertebrae of his spine, the way it clawed at his lungs with sharp talons
through a hole it had cut in his back. The agony was excruciating. Pain was
shooting everywhere. Help me.

Help

Help me, Please.

He felt its teeth sink into his heart and he felt as
his body began to convulse and shake. He shook uncontrollably like he was
having a seizure. Air wasn’t going into his body and he could feel the world
spinning, gravity playing tricks. Was this drowning, was this the sensation? He
was suffocating for certain. But it wasn’t water that surrounded him, it was
solid, cold and clammy.

They’re burying me... Oh God... Oh God, please,
they’re burying me alive, they think I’m dead, but I’m alive.

Then came the blows, powerful heavy blows that snapped
his spine with each pounding strike of the hammer.

I can’t breathe... Please... Don’t kill me...

Please

Please.

I’m not a vampire.

Don’t kill me.