Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (6 page)

Paul pressed it with fingertips, curious but a little
scared to be caught exploring. What could be beyond?

The door swung easily to reveal a steep set of
concrete stairs leading into a basement corridor. It was dark down there and
creepy as hell.

“Oh, this is cool,” he said to himself as a cold
shiver ran down his spine, “and right here is a story.”

He listened for a moment. It sounded dead and empty
except for the breathing draught. He sneaked lower, moving down a few steps and
crouching low to see further into the bowels of the block. He had to know. It
was curiosity, more than that, it was inspiring.

Glancing back over his shoulder to make sure he was
alone, Paul said to himself, “Imagine.” He waited a second then said it again
as though he was daring himself. “Imagine. Do it... do it. I dare you.” With
that he closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them to see what was down
there.

His imagination was at work.

He could see things.

There was a man wearing a mask of steel plates. He was
looking up from the bottom of the stairs. He wore charcoal combat pants and a
heavy jacket, he carried a strange bladed weapon in his right hand made from
multiple jagged saw teeth that were arranged in a fractal symmetry.

Of course this man wasn’t really there, rather he was
the manifestation of a stimulated mind, but the hallucination still had Paul
grinning, both frightened by the concoction of his own imagination and
entertained by the fear he was subjecting himself to.

The mask the man wore was unique; cold grey steel,
angular, it looked like something a gladiator would wear to strike fear into
his opponent. He noticed the mask was screwed onto his face, not to be removed
and the back of the head was exposed to reveal long, matted black hair. There
were eyeholes but he couldn’t see any eyes inside, just an endless dark.

“So you’re the monster who lives in the basement?”
Paul asked.

The imagined man stepped forward, placing his first
foot on the bottom stair. Horrible insects, cockroaches, beetles and woodlice
spilled from the bottom hem of the masked man’s trousers. He took another step
on the staircase to move closer to Paul and more insects dropped from his
clothing, spilling on his heavy work boots, scurrying away or back into the
clothes. Paul could smell oil and engine grease on the man’s clothing.

“You’re interesting,” Paul said to the man with a
frightened giggle. The man took another step, ascending the stairs. “You’ve got
that 1980’s video-nasty thing going on, a Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees
vibe. I like that.” The man raised his bladed weapon, part bludgeon, all sharp
points. “You know what I do like? These insects in your clothing; you could
really freak somebody out with those. Imagine if that’s how we knew you were close,
we couldn’t see you but we could see the insects. That would be cool.”

The insect man in the mask said nothing. He stood on
the stairs a few feet from Paul as an object to be examined. “I think I’ll call
you Lice,” Paul said, “on account of the creepy crawlies.”

Lice said nothing. Paul had a flash thought of the
people on the bus crossing themselves.

“And I think you’re Catholic in some bizarre twisted
way. You are an immortal Roman soldier who was present at the crucifixion. Oh
wait, you abused Christ. You were a centurion present at the crucifixion and
you helped torture Jesus. Your punishment was to live forever as a host to
these horrible crawling insects. Then somehow you upset your Roman masters and
when they realised you couldn’t die they screwed these metal plates to your
face as punishment.”

Lice stared back, but now with an air of pathos. He
wasn’t scary, he had become someone to be pitied.

“Well, excuse me Lice, nice meeting you but you’re not
very original.” Paul backed up the stairs and closed the door to leave Lice
alone in his dungeon. The tormented Roman in the basement was a nice warm up.
That basement location plus his imagination would lead to all kinds of
wonderful creations. Paul could only hope the forest would offer as many opportunities.

----- X -----

The
transition from the darkness of the building lobby to outside was jarring.
Bright yellow sunlight reflected harshly off the compacted snow and ice of the
road. His breath came out as a hard stream of vapour. The air was different
here; it was dry, lacking any humidity. He figured it must be a combination of
the cold and higher altitude; he knew he was many thousands of feet above sea
level, just how high he was uncertain, but there was something odd and unique
about the air.

He looked about him. All clear, no problems. He took
his camera and clicked an image of the road leading towards the forest, then
headed along it feeling somewhat contented. All he had to...

Shit...

Nealla and the Big Man were on the corner of the
building.

They saw him.

Nealla stuffed something in his pocket quickly to hide
it whilst Big Man jerked his hand to his face and scratched his ear. Paul had
no idea what they were doing, but whatever it was they looked guilty and he’d
just intruded.

The uncomfortable pause probably lasted a single
second but felt excruciatingly long.

Paul dropped his gaze and continued walking,
pretending he hadn’t seen. It was only for a moment but his heart was racing,
pounding in his chest. His legs felt weak. His paranoid worry of a
confrontation had been borne out. He’d told himself not to be frightened but
his instincts had remained wary. Jesus Christ, why hadn’t he trusted his
instincts?

He was walking quick, almost ready to run, until he
realised where he was going. He was heading to the forest. The last thing he
wanted was to be cornered in a secluded place by those two.

Were they following?

He didn’t want to turn around and look, especially at
Nealla, that would feel like a challenge of some kind. It was inviting a
confrontation. Big Man was a mute henchman, Nealla seemed to be the one who
made the rules, deciding when or why to attack.

Paul was approaching a parked van with rear windows
that offered a faded and distorted reflection. It wasn’t perfect but it was
enough of a mirror to see what was happening behind him. He could see his own
reflection. The others weren’t near him, he was alone in the street but he
still didn’t have the confidence to turn and look back. Paul slowed but didn’t
stop, scanning the reflection until he sighted them. They’d moved into the
street and were watching him, but they weren’t following. They remained
hovering beside the block doing God only knew what. They were definitely
watching him. Talking about him no doubt; and if his instinct was to be believed,
they were drawing plans or strategies against him, deciding what to do if they
saw him again.

“Stay calm,” Paul whispered to himself. “Stay calm,
they’re not following.”

It didn’t really matter that they weren’t following.
His heart was banging, his stress levels were overloading, his knees felt weak
and all he wanted to do was be locked inside safe and sound. He didn’t want to
be out in the open. He wanted to be safe and right now he felt anything but
safe.

----- X -----

By
the time Paul made it to the forest his enthusiasm had waned to the point that
he didn’t even want to be in this stupid country anymore. Without any
understanding why, he found himself running, pushing his body hard to try and
get up the hill. The forest literally started at the base of a mountain and
there was only one direction he could go. Up. It would make finding his way
back easy, but he didn’t want to go back, ever. He ran hard, stomping his feet
into crunchy frozen snow. He gasped for breath feeling those gasps becoming
sobs, he felt his eyes begin to water, tearing up against the cold air; but it
wasn’t the air and he knew it. He hated this place. He hated it so much he
wanted to cry. In all of his life he had never been homesick, or felt any
reason why anyone should become emotional just because they were away from
home, but right now all he wanted to do was run away. So he ran and he ran and
he ran until his body couldn’t take any more.

Paul slipped on something, dead leaves or something
beneath the snow. He skidded and dropped on one hand, punching through sharp
and frosted snow. His hand felt as though it were being stung by a thousand
needles and it was the final trigger. It was a quiet sobbing, not really
crying, but a release nonetheless. He needed the purge, the chance to get all
of the bottled emotions out, but in doing so he felt ashamed. It was
humiliating even though there was nobody to see it.

“I hate this place. I hate this place. I hate this
place,” he muttered as a mantra. He felt his face screw up and a flush of
emotion surged through him that pushed out a few tears. He tried to say “I want
to go home,” but on the word ‘home’ the anguish took over and morphed the word
into a sound of misery, “aaaaaaa-ha, aaaaaaaa-ha.” Over and over he moaned as a
soft and quiet whimper, a few tears rolled over his cheeks.

Being here in Romania was all wrong. It was just a
mess. He’d burned through all of his cash and extended his graduate loans to
pay for this opportunity. He’d gone into debt to live here for six months and all
he wanted to do was leave. He could. He could quit and go home and give up on
the project, but that would be a stupid and idiotic thing to do. Explain that
one to friends. ‘I rented a place for six months but abandoned the project on
the second day because I felt homesick.’

What a jerk!

He would have to ride it out and make it work.

He picked himself out of the snow and found a place to
sit on a fallen tree. He hugged himself, rocking back and forth, sniffing,
gently shaking his head as though disagreeing with the whole situation.
Occasionally, he felt an urge to hit the palm of his hand against his temple,
admonishing himself for being a baby. He called himself ‘stupid’ many times. He
should have self control, yet here he was embarrassingly crying like a child,
over what? Seeing Nealla and Big Man in the street? Why the hell was he crying?
He was so fucking stupid and he knew it. He couldn’t believe how miserable
seeing those two had made him. Maybe it was just the fact they were there,
hovering by his front door. Maybe it was because he knew, deep down and very
honestly, that at any moment Nealla could attack. Nealla could hold him down,
pull a razor blade from his pocket and slice him up. For the next six months he
was going to have to be on his guard against it.

It just wasn’t fair.

Eventually the emotions subsided. His hands were
pulled inside of his sleeves to keep warm, but the cold air was drifting up his
trousers. His feet were warm, but his legs were getting cold. He had no desire
to move and he actually contemplated that freezing to death slowly here was
preferable to going back to the apartment and risk seeing the bad men. He
didn’t want to go back, but it was getting too cold to just sit here.

“I’m not going back there ever,” he said to himself knowing
it was a lie. He stood up and looked down the hill. The thought of return was
wretched. He turned and looked up the mountain; going higher would just mean
further to come back down. So he walked sideways.

It was the first chance he had to take stock of the
forest. They were beautiful but he hadn’t much appetite to appreciate them. He
had seen from the taxi ride that they stretched on almost endlessly and he
realised that it would be possible in this country to stand in pristine
wilderness and be many miles from another living person.

Paul had walked for some time, slowly zigzagging back
down the mountainside when the corner of his eye registered a flash of light.
Some kind of sparkle, hanging in the trees to the left of him. He stopped,
waited, and the sparkle flashed again.

As he trudged onwards he noticed that he was heading
towards something that looked constructed. Tree branches that were entwined as
though they had been pulled together and bound as saplings; now they were
grown, they were entangled and fused. Then Paul saw something that made him
stop dead in his tracks.

“Oh, this is... interesting,” he said pulling the
camera from his pocket. Already his writing mind was fashioning the image into
a story. The trees that were twisted together formed a gateway into what looked
like a small hollow of about fifteen feet wide. But it was the gateway that
held the curiosity, because hanging down from the archway of tree limbs, was a
twelve inch wooden crucifix, a cruciform, resplendent with a silver figure of
Christ. It was this metal figurine that had sparkled and caught his attention.

As he stepped to the gateway he noticed the second
surprise. Inside the hollow, embedded in the ground, stood a white wooden cross
about three feet high.

It looked like a grave.

Paul felt a sudden flush of excitement. This was more
than just intriguing, it was a genuine mystery, the sort of inspiring oddity
that sparked creativity.

He readied the camera and angled it up to photograph
the crucifix by the entrance and made the third and most nerve tingling
surprise. “Good God!” he whispered.