Whitby Vampyrrhic (34 page)

With that, Theo was through the door. Quickly, Beth shut it, then pushed the bolts home.

‘Can we trust him?' she asked.

‘Yes.' Sally spoke firmly. ‘Absolutely.'

Alec nodded. ‘The man cares about his sister. He'll be fine.'

‘Great God, I hope so,' Beth said with feeling.

For a while, they stood there, listening. From the roof came scrabbling sounds; then there'd be a rattle as a tile slid off the roof to shatter in the yard outside.

Sally gave a strange little giggle.

‘What's so funny?' Beth asked.

‘We never told Theo about the curfew.'

Alec sighed, then with a touch of gallow's humour added, ‘Somehow, being shot by soldiers is the least of our worries.'

Beth cocked her head to one side, as she listened for sounds outside. ‘Of course, has anyone thought what we'll do if Theo doesn't come back?'

Alec grimaced. ‘You mean, he might decide he's more vampire than man, and decide to go hunting with his pack?'

‘He won't.' Sally showed no doubt. ‘Theo will stick by us.'

At that moment, a swift tapping on the door. Beth put her hand on the bolt then hesitated.

A whisper from the other side, ‘It's me . . . Theo.'

Beth opened the door. Theo's bone-white face blazed in the darkness. His eyes were alive with excitement. In his arms, he hefted a gallon jar full of X-Stock. ‘Time to go,' he announced. ‘Our friends are in the attic.' From above, the sound of splintering boards confirmed his statement.

Sally and Beth grabbed their satchels of home-made bombs.

‘Stick close together,' Alec warned. ‘They'll pick off stragglers.'

Beth nodded at the jar of blue fluid. ‘Be careful, Theo. If you drop that it will annihilate half of Whitby.'

Theo's nostrils flared. ‘Danger of death. Those three words are guaranteed to make you feel truly alive. Am I not right?'

A groan sounded deep in the night. It seemed to rise up through the ground beneath their feet. Up, up, up the note climbed into the sky. That groan became a rising wail. One that cried out to the world that a fresh danger approached.

Sally paled. ‘The air-raid siren!'

‘There's no sheltering from what threatens us.' Alec's expression was dark indeed.

‘Just listen to it.' Theo quivered with ecstasy. ‘Can't you hear the very note of doom pouring through that sound? Doesn't it sound like the symphony you'd hear at the death of the universe?'

Beth's voice rose over that despairing wail of the siren: ‘Curfews, Nazi warplanes? Forget them, we've got our own battle to fight.' Taking a deep breath, she walked into the cold night air – and prepared to greet whatever dangers lay in wait.

Thirteen

This is it.
Beth saw the end was in sight.
But how will it end?
She walked quickly along Church Street. In this narrow lane, flanked by unbroken lines of cottages, she could have been in the bottom of a deep canyon. Darkness would have been total, if it weren't for the searchlights that probed the night sky for enemy aircraft. The low cloud reflected some of that glow to earth. Windows glinted. The square stones that paved the street were as knobbly as the scales on a crocodile's back.

Alongside her, Sally and Alec. They wore their satchels of bombs. Theo, the gaunt man in the white shirt, didn't feel the cold. He carried the flask of blue liquid. More than once she imagined its destructive force if he were to drop it. The explosion would wipe those cottages from the Earth. And in those cottages would be innocent people. Already they must have taken refuge in cellars, as the mournful cry of the air-raid siren called out that death and destruction were on their way.

Every so often, Beth would catch a glimpse of the sea down to her left. Dark waters surged through the harbour mouth. The chill breeze would have had its genesis somewhere over the Russian Steppe. It might have been her imagination, but with those scents of brine came hints of dark forest. Then this was Whitby, a town that lingered on the borderland between this world and realms stranger than she could imagine. Might those scents of fern and leaf and animal musk have drifted from some other sphere? At one point, a group of soldiers hurried along the street. Beth and her companions sought refuge in one of the alleyways. With the siren screaming, as if it were hell-bent on being heard beyond the grave, the soldiers didn't hear the curfew-breakers as they ran for cover. However, the moment the four stepped out into Church Street again they immediately encountered a figure.

‘I've found her.'

Beth found she looked into Tommy's colourless eyes.

‘Miss Charnwood's at the abbey ruin. They've put her in a grave.'

The dog stuck close to his master. Both appeared anxious. Then the siren penetrated Beth's skull. That rising-falling note could have been a drill bit boring through. Tommy appeared to accept Theo's presence without any concern. No doubt he divined that the gaunt man's nature shared similarities with his own.

‘You must be quick,' Tommy called.

Theo asked, ‘Is my sister still alive?'

Tommy already hurried back along the street. Sam moved with effortless grace beside him.

Beth gripped the satchel strap tight to stop it swinging dangerously against the cottage walls. Then she and her friends followed the boy. Soon they scaled the long flight of steps up towards the cliff-top cemetery. Theo's energy appeared boundless. For the others, this climb proved a tough one with their burdens. Beth gulped cold air into her lungs. Her calf muscles burnt. A stitch dug into her side. Yet nobody paused, nobody complained.

As they climbed the steps, they left the main body of Whitby behind. Cottages thinned out. Searchlights shone upward from so many different angles that the glow reflected by the cloud layer conjured shadows that danced across the ground. Even the shadows of stationary objects, like trees and lamp-posts, darted madly. Restless, shape-shifting phantoms, or so they seemed to Beth.

When they reached the graveyard, they continued along the path towards the abbey ruins. Two miles beyond them, yet more searchlights. The rods of white light could have been unearthly columns that held the night sky aloft. And as they hurried to the abbey, the siren finally stopped. A sudden silence pressed down on them with an ominous force all of its own. They entered the ancient cliff-top ruin. Gothic walls, pierced with vast arched windows, towered over them. The abbey lacked a roof, so the searchlight's reflected gleams lit the grass where a tiled floor would have once lay. Masonry poked from the ground, like giant fists pushing through from beneath the earth.

Tommy held up his hand. Then he pointed.

Beth followed his outstretched finger. There, crouching on the ground, a figure in white. But Tommy claimed that Eleanor had been put in a grave? Besides, the figure wasn't the proprietor of the hotel. This was a vampire. The woman who, in life, had been Mary Tinskell. The creature appeared interested in what lay beneath her. She leaned forward to pick at something.

Theo gestured for them to take cover behind a curtain of masonry. He set down the jar of X-Stock, then climbed the pitted wall, until he could look through one of the stone window frames. The weathered stonework provided easy handholds, so Beth joined him. From this vantage point they had a plain view of what Mary found so fascinating.

Eleanor had been placed in one of the disused stone coffins. The anthropomorphic tomb consisted of an oblong stone block, which, centuries ago, had been hollowed out to form a human shape. Into it, Eleanor had been partly concealed. The artefact lay buried in the earth almost to its rim. Clearly, the vampire had dragged a stone slab across it, so it formed a partial lid on the tomb, covering Eleanor's chest. However, it left her head exposed. The vampire took pleasure in digging her fingers into the mortal woman's face.

‘What's she doing?' Eleanor whispered.

‘Mary knows Gustav is in love with Eleanor. If you ask me, the spiteful creature is torturing my sister, because it will hurt Gustav when he finds out how she died.' Theo spoke so matter-of-factly that Beth shuddered. ‘Remember, vampires don't operate to normal rules of logic. Mary will take great pleasure in producing Eleanor's head to Gustav, so proving how strong she is. No doubt she wants to rule the vampires.'

‘We've got to get Eleanor away from there.'

‘We can't use the bombs. The explosion would kill my sister, too.'

‘Then I'll lure Mary away.'

‘Theo, I've got something in my veins that Mary wants.'

Beth scrambled to the ground. In whispers, she told the others what she'd found, then urged them to stay out of sight. After plucking one of the bottles from the satchel, she set the bag down so, when the time came, she could move fast. As stealthily as she could, she crept through the skeletal edifice. Its ruined towers flickered in hues of brown and gold in the searchlights' glow. Shadows conducted an eerie, undulating dance across the walls.

Beth moved along the wall to her right, in order to ensure that the vampire's back remained to her. However, the creature took so much delight in tugging hard at the rings in her victim's ear lobes that she didn't notice the intruder. What's more, Eleanor's groans of pain drowned the whisper of Beth's feet through the grass.

Sliding along the wall as quickly as she dared, Beth glanced ahead of her. She knew what she wanted. A moment later she found it. In that eroded masonry she found a Gothic archway that led to the steps of the tower. These only ascended a few feet before they reached an iron fence – a barrier to anyone foolhardy enough to desire to climb the unsafe structure. In those swarming shadows lay ancient stone slabs. Monks' feet had passed over them for more than a thousand years. Bit by bit the sandals had worn the stone slab away until it had formed a shallow concave.

Perfect!

Beth Layne glanced out through the door. The vampire plucked hairs from Eleanor's head, chuckling with glee as the woman cried out. Beth thought:
Careful now. One slip and you'll blow sky high.
Hands shaking slightly, she used a lip of stone beside the doorway to force the metal cap from the bottle neck. That done, she gently tipped its contents into a floor slab that had been worn into something resembling a shallow bowl. As she did so, she prayed there'd be no moss on the slab, otherwise the X-Stock would react so aggressively it would blaze her face from her skull.

When the last drop had been poured (fortunately with no detonation), Beth went to the doorway that opened into what would have been the interior of the abbey.

She whistled. Vampire Mary's head came up, senses alert; she turned with savage speed. When the white eyes fixed on Beth, they burnt with utter ferocity. What the creature would have seen was an oh-so-vulnerable victim filled with fresh blood. Confident that her prisoner in the stone coffin couldn't escape, Mary leapt to her feet. Her white nightdress billowed in the breeze.

Then she ran at Beth. A blur of movement. A shocking spectacle of aggression fused with bloodlust.

Beth retreated through the doorway into the base of the tower. There was no exit here. Her plan must work, if she was to escape with her own life intact. Taking great care not to step into the X-Stock, Beth hopped over to the other side. Then she moved as far as she could from the shallow depression in the stone slab that contained a pool of liquid explosive, which was perhaps an inch deep and eighteen in diameter. Pulses of radiance from the searchlights made that puddle of death flicker an iridescent blue.

Mary darted through the archway, hands stretched out, fingers hooked into claws; an expression of greedy anticipation deformed her face.

Her bare feet splashed into the fluid. Instantly, her feet exploded. Amazingly, she regained her balance, so she stood on ankle stumps. Yet the expression of bloodlust on her face had changed to one of confusion. Those uncanny eyes glanced around her; she knew something had gone wrong, but couldn't identify the problem.

The X-Stock was relentless. Each time the vampire's flesh and bone touched the chemical it reacted explosively.

Beth watched a machine gun-quick series of explosions devour the monster. The bursts of white flame set the nightdress alight. Each explosion destroyed five inches of limb. With each one, the vampire became shorter. To Beth, it looked as if the creature sank through the stone floor into the ground. When the detonations reached Mary's hips she suddenly opened her mouth to let forth a huge scream of pain.

The explosions quickened. Hips, stomach, chest: all vanished in a flash of fire. Incendiary jaws devoured the vampire's body. From start to finish, it took maybe ten seconds. And after those ten seconds all that remained resting on the slab, like a mask, was the flesh of the face. Still its eyes rolled in the sockets. An expression of someone desperately searching for an escape route.

But there was no escape. Soon even the face melted.

Beth stepped over the smeary remains of the creature, then hurried through the cavernous body of the ruin to free her friend.

Fourteen

Eleanor's a formidable woman. Her speedy recovery, however, surprised even Beth. As they left the abbey, she told Eleanor what had happened since the kidnap.

When Eleanor saw her brother with the group, she nodded at him, a strangely formal greeting. Then, with smiles of relief, she hugged him – then the rest of the little band of vampire killers.

‘So you brought my home-made bombs,' Eleanor observed. ‘Good. Let's put them to the test.'

Alec said, ‘But we can't run around in the dark, trying to pick off vampires one by one.'