Billy Came, Chapter 16

16. a, Village of the Damned

I stood on the ivory stairs and, like a tourist taking in the vastness of the ocean from a seafront promenade for the first time, propped one boot upon a baluster, both hands shoulder-width apart firmly on the ivory railing at my hips.

The ingenuity that lay around and beyond the staircase, this Eden and the potential it unwittingly proffered, moved me beyond reason.  The panorama stretched for mile upon impossible mile in every direction beneath the Earth, beyond the knowledge and the reasoning of the surface dwellers.

Closer to hand, not far below, now, was the village spreading out from the foot of the staircase.  Single storey buildings, circular, no more than 20' across with terracotta tiles meeting at a shallow peak over the centre of the building hugged together in clusters.  Dark shadows in the walls suggested glassless windows, also circular.

The huts, as I had began to think of them, were in blocks of eight, two rows of four, offset from each other to form a loose rhombus.  From up here, their layout reminded me of the wheels around which tank tracks rolled.  Picket fences between the huts and around the 'block' almost completed the illusion that a World War I Mark V tank had been overturned and left to rust beneath the silver sky.

Smaller pathways ran lengthways between the blocks, juxtaposed by broader throughfares at their ends.  The whole layout portrayed a relaxed grid, the angles ending each row adding to a sense of fluidity.  One word struck me as I tried to decipher the pattern: purpose.

The further we descended, the greater the scope the 360° spiral of our descent afforded us.  Many blocks, thoroughfares and, at intersections, larger buildings whose purposes were difficult to determine from up here, made up a complete village.  From the staircase with the sun above us at its centre, the effect was both dazzling and dizzying.

Looking even further, beyond the village's outskirts, mesmerising vistas of the whole breath-taking subterrannean world these creatures had created heaped further mystery upon its creation, and creator(s).  Dark, dense woods appeared to support the sky.  Shadowy dells and glistening lakes pocked the landscape that ran with speed towards one all-encompassing horizon, which suddenly truncated the world in every direction you cared to look.  The view made descending this never-ending rotunda feel like riding the world's grandest and most impossible helter-skelter.

To the west, rolling plains ran parallel to and beneath the miles of mist that blossomed from an unidentified source beyond the sun above us to form the low, mercurial sky.  The further towards the horizon the mists stretched, the angrier their countenance turned, blackening into storm clouds in the far, far distance.

Where the land eventually met the sky, a true lesson in perspective, shadowy mountains bordered the plains.  I wondered what, if anything, lay beyond the mountains, which sat around the horizon like the edge of a long-extinct caldera enclosing the land within.  The light from the sun seemed only to offer the landscape's furthest reaches a mere wisp of light, and that only begrudgingly.

Jutting from within the distant gloom, the mountains' lilac and white peaks soared to puncture the distant thunderheads, ripping a pyrotechnic display of lightning from their swollen bellies unrivalled by any electrical storm I'd ever witnessed above ground.

As if to prove the view didn't exist for the sake of aesthetics, a clap of thunder buffeted the air in the distance, renting the sky with a visible shockwave.  The effect the shockwave imparted was as if we had been plunged underwater, that the clouds were undulating on its surface above, rippling, wave after wave.  Then another shock followed, and another. 

The distance, however, was so great that the thunder's echoes were little more than muttered grumbles by the time they reached this safe haven on the staircase.  The light from the artificial sun proved the last and determinate barrier to the soundwaves, the thunder dying with the shush of a lazy tide dragging itself back to the sea as it washed over the vampires in the courtyard below.

Still, it was enough to make them curse and gnash their little 'v's of blackening and rotting teeth, teeth that I suspected had once been fangs to rival those of Perveen's.

Billy's fangs had, of course, gone the same way as those of the industrious vampires below.  I wondered what could cause such degradation, especially given how critical fangs were to vampires' sustenance.  Then, I remembered Billy and his Gibben Axe, the way it slipped through my flesh with ease and he'd let the sliver slip down his throat without chewing the slightest bit.  And then that I'd done the same; another shudder rippled through me, this one seeming to come from my stone dead heart. 

It all begged the question, what weaponry did these villagers—for that's the impression those scrabbling about below gave me in their rustic and somehow ancient setting—possess that kept them safe?  More gruesome still, what was their food?  I just hoped that I wasn't on today's menu!

As I turned my eyes from the settling clouds back down to the scene below, I noticed that more droplets of mist had settled on my forearms.  I felt nothing from them until I saw the little globules tentatively hanging from the hairs, lying in their natural arc close to the skin.

Those droplets ignited a strange sensation, sending shivers along my spine.  Was it an aftershock of the previous invasion, or an instinctive, habitual reaction to 'cold', perhaps?  A bit of both, maybe, but the very mist itself seemed furtive, almost alive.  It genuinely felt as if the moisture wanted to burrow into the waxy, leathery coating that was my new skin.

I hadn't the time to dwell.  A gentle reminder, in the form of a hand at each elbow from behind, worked to break the will of the hypnotist.  Perhaps the hoodies had also felt the need to break that spell.  That sense of sentience subsided once we began moving, continuing our descent.

The further we meandered downwards—forever downwards—the lesser the immediate glare of the artificial sun impeded vision, affording a better view of what I could only assume was to be my new home.  Or at least base camp.  The cloud was also thinning around our ankles until, eventually, we were out of the malleable mist altogether; leaving those clinging, miniscule droplets felt like shedding an old skin, invigorating my repressed psyche for the rest of the descent.

16. b, The Miracle of Subterrannea

We approached what felt like the halfway point, whereupon a commotion broke out on the ground below us.  There had been silence and stillness as the inhabitants had held their salute position.  Then, in an instant, life!, as if a hypnotist had clicked their fingers.  The stupor that had beset the community below ever since the clouds had parted to herald our arrival erupted into action, and how!

The clouds above us began to reform, filtering the glare to a more amenable luminosity.  Of everything that had struck me as amazing in such a short space of time, the artificial sun was the most sensational.  Had it not changed my attitude the moment I espied it?

For an interminable time, I had marched along that murky, medieval corridor, my mood as dreary as the grey stone walls, floor and ceiling that coccooned us in the clattering echoes of our footsteps.  But after only a short time out on the other side of that dingy rat run, my dark mood had dropped away.  In its place, curiosity; nw that I could begin to see more clearly, hope.

Whoever my 'new' ancestors were, they must have been possessed of any number of singular geniuses between them.

That was assuming two things: that they, my forebears, did, in fact, create the sun and the world that had sprung up around it.  And two, that they were, in fact, dead.  For all I knew, they may be living still, like ancient gods in the equivalent of the Olympian temple, but one of their own making.

On the other hand, they may well have inherited this land as part of a tryst dating back centuries; to the Crusades, perhaps?  Or, and neither beyond the realms of possibility, they could have taken this land by force from a far more technologically advanced, albeit passive and at one with nature, species than we.

For whatever reason, the latter rang truest; I know not why.  This theory contradicted my earlier line of thinking about The Ark, but (what now passed for) my gut rumbed both inkling and warning in equal measures.

No matter how it came to be, this place was miraculous.  If any scientist from the mortal world above could cast their eyes over this technological marvel, they would happily die here.  As I discovered later, many had done just that.  Technically.  They had sacrificed their mortal human existence in order to wile away eternity in this ever-evolving melting pot of sciences, learning and postulating for eternity.

One thing (amongst many others) did strike me as odd.  In all my research, the vampire community wasn't.  A community, I mean.  Individuals they were, by all accounts, not communal beasts.  Arrogance and self-import leant itself to a life of isolation and seclusion, almost always making the typical undead creature a lone predator.

Broods and covens did exist, of course.  In each of those, the strongest or eldest vampire most often held sway, self-appointing themselves as the figurehead or deity of the sect.  But whenever gathered many personalities who thought themselves great, greatest, all-powerful, there was friction.  And for a race, a genus that had to pick new members oh, so carefully, the threat of challenge from within to members with much to teach was surely a trait to avoid.

But as we neared sub terra, the controversial evidence was plain.  Working side by side, almost in a familial sense, were vampires of all ages, all colours.  There was harmony and it sang up the stairs to greet us as we're neared the ground.

I turned around to seek further direction from the hoodies, but they'd disappeared.  Again.  I stared back up the stairs, but that turned out to be an inadvisable idea.  Even though mist was still floating across the sun, its glare blazed off the galaxy of stars trapped within the twisting ivory, refracting light in a kaleidoscope of colours and angles.

The hoodies could have retraced their steps twenty steps further back towards the sun at the top of the stairs or two hundred.  Even with my keen eyesight, it was impossible to determine anything with certainty looking back up the staircase, the sun seeming to cascade downwards, caught in every twinkle, every glint.

Assuming that the hoodies had not escorted me here just to take in the view, I determined that there was only one direction for me to go.

16. c, Making an entrance

At last, I alighted the staircase and set out across the courtyard, with the sole intention of making contact with those I'd seen working close to the foot of the stairs.  After all, I assumed they would be my new neighbours and compatriots.  But I'll be jiggered; I hadn't taken two steps onto the cobbles when several vampires surged towards, carrying weaved baskets under their arms.  Before I could flinch, they began throwing petals ahead of every step I took.

Panic averted, I tried to engage them in conversation, but they hunkered down to their task, ignoring me.  It wasn't as if they couldn't understand me; they were talking to each other in English, but none proferred an answer to my questions.

The petals were actually from black roses, which looked and felt like midnight velvet; they were laying them before me in huge handfuls.  So beautiful, each individual petal, that I tried to avoid stepping on them, but there were so many it was impossible.  And when I didn't quite know which direction I was supposed to take at a fork in the path or an intersection in this new world, I had only to follow the newly-laid path of petals as the lowly vampires rushed ahead with basket after basket of gorgeous decadence.

Giving up trying to dodge the petals, I took the opportunity to study the creatures.  With the exception of a young boy with the look of a Dickensian urchin, none were yet to meet my eye.  Then, from seemingly nowhere, a question popped into my head: where did Perveen fit in this hierarchy?

The thought took me so by surprise that I had no choice but to stand stock still and ponder it.  So, what did I actually know thus far?

Clearly, Perveen held a position of prominence within this community; I had seen the evidence of that myself.  Her court had hung on her every word upon our arrival; even Billy had bowed in supplication unto her.  Any lingering doubt about this particular supposition disappeared when I compared how she carried herself to the humble villagers about me.  But had Perveen been undead long enough to make it to the top, slender branches of the Subterranea family tree?  Or even just up into its boughs?

It was obvious she had, but how had she achieved such prominence in a relatively short space of time?  Fifteen years or so was the absolute longest she could have been here.  And whilst that was a lot longer than I'd been a vampire, compared to others like Billy and The Master, she was a mere infant, and me an embryo.

I was in the midst of pondering this when, to a vampire, everyone in the vicinity hunkered down onto one knee.  Floating somehwere near the top of my conscious mind I realised I'd heard a sound like a thunderclap and, at first, wondered if they were ducking for cover (and if I should follow suit).

But the sky showed no after effect or shockwave as I'd witnessed earlier from on the staircase.  But what I did notice was that, since I'd been stood still off in my own little world, the pathway of petals now stretched all the way across a small square.  It looked amazing, but it was what—or who—was waiting at the end of the path of petals that quite literally blew me away.

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Chapter 17 » »

Billy Came, Chapter 15

15. a, The Pleasure and the Pain

The mists, those that were fogging my mind, cleared in an instant; focus returned and I turned it with full force to the task at hand, namely working out whether I was to meet my new people or the executioner.  All those thoughts of Vlad and The Grail disspated, leaving a hollow where they'd been.  That void then filled, too, its ragged edges drawn together by the vacuum that the departure of impossible musings had created.

Once more I led the descent down the splendid spiral staircase, taking in its beauty as best as I could.  Behind me, the two hoodies matched my every step, their footfall echoing mine from only a yard or two behind me.

The turbulent mist had similarly cleared overhead; the artificial sun sat blazing above us, so intense that I almost didn't notice that the clouds were now following us down the stairs, billowing around our ankles as if somehow directed towards us.  No, that wasn't quite right; the mist seemed sentient, as if it belonged to a remote larger organic being.

From out of nowhere, I began tittering to myself; the impromptu mirth soon became a full bellied laugh.  It had suddenly occurred to me that, to anyone watching (and I had the unnerving feeling that someone was), I would look like a guest on a '70s chat show, descending onto the floor of a TV set in a cascade of cloud, borne of dry ice hidden out of sight in the wings.  Where that thought had originated, I knew absolutely not.

Trying to regain control, I forced myself to looked down at my feet (for the want of any better notion).  Surprisingly. it worked; but only because, within in a second, I was mesmerised.  The sun's rays, plundering the mist at my ankles, picked out opalescent, mother of pearl and aurora borealis pigments embedded within the ivory staircase, glinting furiosly now that the sun was at full muster.

Millions of sparks, like November fireworks or the first frost forming amidst tarmac's nooks and crannies in early winter, were reflecting and refracting beneath my feet and beneath my palm as it passed over the pallid banister.  The entire static structure became fluid, twinkling as if the sculptor had trapped a whole galaxy at the beginning of creation in the very stone when they had begun carving this incredible staircase.  From some way off—in another life, perhaps—I imagined canned studio applause ringing in my ears as my mind began to wander again.

Before it could wander too far, it was snapped back to reality (or what passed for reality, now).  In an instant, the cloud had taken on a bitter cold edge, so cold that it felt 'angry'.  Mist settled on my forearm, inflicting a sudden shooting pain.  It felt as if a rattlesnake had snapped its jaws around the muscle, proceeded to dig its teeth in deep, puncturing veins, dispatching its venom to seep into my very bones and was finally leaving a hollow numbness in its wake.

Wait!  Vampires don't feel the cold, I told myself, so how could a cloud, cold or otherwise, inflict me?  The numbness was beginning to spread, making it difficult to think.  But, as I forced myself to believe the pain couldn't be real, the numbness began to subside; in a moment or two, the ache was but a memory.  A nasty memory, but gone, just the same.

Struggling to decipher the mystery, the answer came to me suddenly, as if carved into my mind by a bolt of lightning.  The answer heralded from the same unidentified quarter whence I'd earlier heard the 'applause'.  I thought I'd only imagined that audience; now, I wondered.  Yes, there was a definite source, but it was neither tangible nor visible, at least not from this vantage point so high up on the spiralling staircase.

Some unidentifiable someone—unknown, but somehow familiar—had implanted the sensation of pain into my mind.  Not only the sensation, but the imagery of the snake, its jaws and the venom to accompany it.  The bite had felt wholly real and physical, even down to the spreading numbness.

The 'pain' must have been my mind's reaction, likely out of habit, to that synaptic invasion.  Or perhaps to the touch on my mind itself, as if someone had slipped their hands between my skull and brain and had began to massage the nodes, all the while wearing barbed wire gloves to convey the sensation, which wasn't all (but mostly) unpleasant.

So, vampires can feel pain, then, albeit not in the traditional sense, namely through a physical act.  Should I have been offended that whoever wielded this power had tried to shock me?  If they had wanted to hurt me with any conviction, they could have done so, of that I was certain.  With that power at their disposal, they had the capacity to stave off my amateurish act of self defence, and some.  But they had desisted as soon as I resisted them.

Had I got it wrong?  Could it be that they didn't possess the power with which I credited them?  Or could it be that their power had a range and that I fell just outside it?  Absolutely not.  I felt them retract the sensation as soon as they knew I'd received their message; they had more in their arsenal and were satisfied enough in the knowledge that I knew so!

But offended by the attack?  No, I was fascinated.  What's more, hungry.  Imagine having such a power, to be able to implant pain into someone's mind, let alone remotely, but from a distance?  For a moment, I did.

15. b, Who is Thine Enemy?

For the first time, a yearning for the power with which vampires are endowed engulfed me, entirely.  Yes, I'd already toyed with bending sight.  I was also working on Slippage, and with some limited success, to date.  I'd even ran so fast across rooftops that it was tanatamount to flying.  But this ability to control what someone is thinking to the point that it causes them physical pain (albeit implied)?  This was another level of supernatural, a power akin to divinity.

I halted suddenly, and stood there a second, for two reasons.  First, I was trying to work out how one could conjure this very special trick.  But also, the shock of the 'bite' had, metaphorically, stolen my very breath.  I needed my body to catch up with my mind and vice versa.

Thankfully, I think the hoodies were as distracted by the view from the staircase as I had been.  Maybe they were as unfamiliar with this level beneath the main house as I.  At any rate, I felt no sudden prod in the back for me to proceed.

Using this respite, I applied logic to the process of the mind pain implantation based on what I'd felt.  It wasn't as straightforward as trying to work out why a slap on the wrist stung so.

After several moments reflection, I deduced that this talent would work only if the type of pain the perpetrator was trying to inflict reflected the victim's situation, or something from their past.  For me, I happened to feel the 'pain' at the place where the scar from one of Billy's incisions was still visible on my arm.  Coupled with the image of the snake that the perpertrator 'sent' with the instruction to my brain to sense pain, it really had felt as though I had been bitten.  Not only bitten, but had felt the venom coarsing through my veins, too.

I futher deduced that the sadist imparting the pain would also need to have established a prior connection with the victim's mind.  With a sense of familiarity of the attacker, the victim's brain's defences wouldn't rear up at the recognition of their presence.  Animals, dogs in particular, excel in this trait.

Upon that realisation, it was as if another jigsaw had fallen into place, this one at the behest of an invisible hand.  Given my specialist knowledge of vampires prior to becoming one, I knew that legend suggests that one has to invite a vampire into their home before the vampire's powers can take effect.  Similarly, when Harker had arrived at Castle Dracula, the Count was like a study in stone until Harker extended pleasantries.  Yet further, there were countless accounts of the Count assuming the shape of a wolf to take into account.  The impression of a higher level of sense, an animalistic sense, was too great to ignore.

But my reasoning suggested more than simple familiarity at play, here.  In order for this talent to work, the perpertrator would also need to be able to 'see' the situation in which the victim found themselves, like viewing a live feed of events.  Without making the type of pain relevant to the victim, wasn't it likely that any sensation would seem so alien and disassociated with their predicament that it would have no effect upon them?  Yes, relevance was key to making remote pain work, too.

Assuming that my forensic process was correct, and I had a strong feeling it was, that meant I already knew my attacker, even if I couldn't yet identify them.  The strong feeling of familiarity I felt at the 'touch' of the invasion, a solicitous feeling, like returning to an ex-lover's bed while they were in a relationship with (an absent) someone else, bore out the logic.  What that meant for me in the future, I had no idea.  The shudder that wracked my body this time was real.

But, my situation aside for a moment, just imagine if all those factors aligned and you were devout on hurting someone.  The torture that someone who possessed that power could administer—without even having to get near the victim—would be unimaginable, interminable, deadly.  And the victim wouldn't know to defend themselves until it was too late to do anything about it.

The next logical step was, of course, to discover who here would want to cause me pain, or to at least send a message that they could, should they so desire.  I tried to recapture the feeling of familiarity that was wrapped around the intrusion.  Even through the barbs, their touch was still frustratingly intangible, like smelling a certain brand of perfume as you walked alomg the street, then trying to remember of whom the scent reminded you.  But the harder I tried to identify the attacker, the quicker their essence slipped away into the shadows of memory, like a raindrop dissipating into a reservoir, a full-blown dream shrinking down to the echo-blip of the Big Bang on a Cathode Ray Tube television set, before blinking out completely.

Perhaps more pressing, I needed to establish how I could protect myself should whoever was responsible for the 'snakebite' decide to try to take another nip.  That process, I decided, was likely to be more difficult than finding out the perpertrator in the first instance.  And, perhaps, more disturbing if it was someone whom I'd previously thought of as a friend.  After all, who else but someone who knew me would feel the need to get inside my mind?

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Chapter 16 » »

Billy Came, Chapter 14

14, a. The Goth and the road to Eastern Europe

The more books I uncovered in the adult fiction and reference sections of the library, the more I realised that Mrs. Rogers had been very selective with the fodder she'd fed me in the past.

As I transitioned into adolescence, the younger girl who worked at the library, with whom I'd had little contact since our first meeting, had blossomed into a Goth.  Named Lilith.

Real name or not, she was in prime position to show me what Mrs. Rogers hadn't in the way of gruesome literature.  To me, Lilith looked like she'd just walked out of Frankenstein.  Or, now in hindsight, had provided the template for Winona's wardrobe in Beetlejuice.  To paraphrase yet another film, Death Became Her.

Point me in the right direction, Lilith did.  Compared to what I was discovering with her help, most of the past material read like Winnie The Pooh compared to the legends that were, in fact, based on fact.

Once I got my teeth into the new material, the non-fiction especially, I concluded that humanity needed horror novels and their writers in order to escape the horror that humanity was indeed capable of inflicting upon itself.

I would have been annoyed at Mrs. Rogers' censorship, even betrayal of my trust, had this new world of discovery not swallowed me so quickly and completely.

The volumes of non-fiction awaiting discovery would solidify my notion that the human race really was capable of atrocities worse than anything that the supernatural entities dreamt up by the most gifted and renowned horror fiction authors could inflict on humankind.

As I progressed through senior school, for a time, my priorities changed.  Through both peer and parent expectation rather than self endeavour, the library took second place to football.  It even descended to third place during those halcyon-tinted months on the occasions Louise and I were 'on' during our off-and-on adolescent courtship.

But, no matter where the library stood in the pecking order of youthful priorities, the learning potential within its millions of pages was always there, calling.  It provided comfort when the course of young, teenage infatuation came crashing down onto the rocks of insecurity and a Plan B whenever a Plan A met a similar fate.

The pages that were calling loudest weren't any you'd find replayed in a B Movie with plastic fangs, unconvincing blood and big-busted wenches with penchants for tripping over humongous roots in the middle of woods at twilight.

No, the tomes Lilith helped me find, and whence I found my feet on this trail of discovery, relied heavily on the myths from Eastern Europe.  My learning traipsed across Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.  Through it all, one name seemed to traverse the Medieval period, one familiar to all: Vlad III Dracula.

14. b, The Impaler, the author and a deal with the Devil?

Over the years, my research broadened by both topic (through necessity) and my increased ability to get to other libraries and colleges to access more diverse and scholarly material (thanks to my trusty Vespa and a somewhat growing reputation in the field).

Of course, Vlad Țepeș, as The Impaler or other cognomen, cropped up as a constant cross reference.  To some, he was a monster, the embodiment of evil; to others, Romanians especially, he was a hero. But, wherever Vlad's name turned up post 1973, so, it seemed, did Bram Stoker's.

And is it a wonder that Stoker thought Vlad III such a great template for his literary vampire?  Vlad's story is the prime example of factual history being more frightening than the fiction he engendered.

Sick and tired of being the rope in the Empiric tug-of-war between the Roman Church and the Ottomans, Vlad III Dracula was keen to assert Wallachia as a truly independent state.  With Wallachia's size and position, it's no wonder Vlad constantly felt like a pawn in a game played by political powers far greater than the forces at his disposal.

Yet, on many occasions, his daring brought him impossible victories.  That fearlessness, or some other force, even protected him as he shape-shifted into a Turk and walked, bold as brass, straight into the heart of the enemy camp on a scouting mission, poised as the settlement was in a position of siege surrounding Vlad's army.

He walked out of that camp wholly unharmed, only to return the following night with men of his own, all similarly disguised, and decimated the enemy, burning their tents and turning them on themselves in a riot of confusion.  Genius.

The way he came across his cognomen, the Impaler (Țepeș, in Romanian) is now common knowledge, much thanks to his immortalisation by Stoker.  Driven by revenge (for his father's murder), Vlad III is said to have impaled more than 30,000 people during his reigns.

This method of punishment didn't stop at enemy soldiers, either.  He'd also impale women and infants should the need for sending a powerful message arise.

In one infamous Easter celebration, Vlad invited the Boyars, the noblemen whom he believed had betrayed his father and elder brother, to a feast at his castle.  Once all the guests were gathered, some 500 in all, he rounded them all up, separating the men from their wives and children.  Before the eyes of the treacherous male Boyars, he impaled their wives and children on huge spikes, before submitting those men to the same fate.

But perhaps his most effective use of impalement was as a key defensive strategy when he was vastly outnumbered by advancing Ottoman forces.  It also outlines the lengths to which he'd go to protect what was rightfully his.

The first defensive attack strategy he deployed during this assault he had learned from his previous captors, The Turks.  The first stage was to evacuate Wallachia's peoples and livestock lying in the path of the advancing enemy forces.  Thus safe, he burnt those vacated regions of his own precious Wallachia to the ground, leaving no grain, wild animal or vegetation for the enemy to eat.

Next, he poisoned wells, so that not only did the advancing forces have nothing to eat, but any water they drew from the ground would also poison them.

Stage three saw his army round up the sick and diseased from within his own people, those suffering from the plague and the lepers.  He then dressed the infirm, with their terribly contagious diseases, as Turks, then despatched them amongst the enemy to spread leprosy and the black death about the heart of their army itself.

His final line of defence, which the enemy reached in a state of much fatigue and illness, was the most bloodcurdling.

He planted a field of 20,000 previously captured Turks directly in the path of their advancing countrymen.  Every Turk in that field he'd had impaled rectum-first, skewered atop a greased, fifteen foot spike and then left them to die, sliding down the pole in a torture of agony beneath the scalding sun.  With their organs burst and their entrails fodder for feathered scavengers, it served as an effective deterrent and warning for the advancing Ottomans.

Despite having far fewer troops to draw on, Vlad III Dracula won that battle, the Ottomans retreating to the Danube to rebuild and refocus.

I retell these stories here not just for effect, or to glorify the original Dracula.  These provide examples of his blood lust, his ruthlessness and his love for his precious Wallachia.  There are many more.  But it wasn't the details of his accomplishments that bothered me.

It was always the details of his death that never rang true in my ears.  They seemed so scant, contradictory and spurious, even.  Possessed with many eyes and ears at his disposal, would Vlad III Dracula not have seen the attempt on his life coming through the same crystal ball that had helped him to evade death so many times before?

One might imagine still that a man possessed with the resilience to avoid the Sultan's sword as a boy, to sweet-talk a traitor into letting him out of incarceration to marry one of his own and to thrice take the seat of the Voivode of Wallachia after twice seeking exile to be alive still, and fast approaching his 600th birthday!

But it begs the question, what did Vlad have in his possession to offer his captors that protected him from the Muslim torture chambers, from which he learned so many of his own ways and would eventually turn them on those he'd learned from?

Stoker chose Vlad Țepeș as the template for the most well-known monster of them all, barring the devil himself, for good reason, methinks.  Mayhap the Irish author, faced with illnesses a-plenty as a child, had opportunity to sell his own soul in exchange for a longer life.

As most horror aficionados know, the name Dracula translates, in modern Hungarian, as 'Son of the Devil' (rather than 'Son of the Dragon', in more ancient parlance).  Who'd then argue that Vlad, obsessed with the notion that his name and his family live on forever, didn't broker a deal with Stoker in exchange for the writer's promise to immortalise them both?

So entrenched was my fascination (and conviction that vampires existed), that I set out to travel to those countries that formed the gateway to the East, steeped in mythology, hidden beneath the mists of time.

The books and authors on the subject may have differed in the many libraries I'd visited since leaving school. But there was a common theme to each story that made my imagination sigh desperately when I realised I was reading another translation of the same text, just in a different dust cover by a different publishing house.

So rather than rely on the literal translations of learned scholars, which I would come to find lacked the passion of the Eastern Europeans and that lost so much in accuracy in literal translation, I decided to go there, to taste the atmosphere in which these legends could both take shape and survive of their own volition for so very, very long.

14, c. The Crusades, The Grail and The Conspiracy

One subplot that thrilled me as much as the main focus of my research, even moreso after my visit to the Vatican City, was that of The Crusades.  Not the propaganda-fuelled tale that our educational curriculum seemed instructed to paint, all glory, conveniently highlighting King Richard's victories from those trips to the Holy Land in the Middle Ages.

Little did the curriculum cover the hardships, the losses, the intervention of the Knights Templar, the capture of Richard the Lionheart, and the extent of his fiery temper, which saw him triumph at Limassol and simply sell Cyprus to The Knights.

Nor did our sacred learning cover in any depth the reason for those forays into a land we had little right to invade.  Our argument for invading Jerusalem in the Middle Ages?  To seize control of the Holy City in the name of Christianity.  Wasn't the Papal empire big enough?  Pah!  History and its cycles never fail to amaze and astound.  Will humanity never learn?

But this was necessary information for me as a scholar.  From that broad topic, I honed in on the hastily scribbled parchments that The Knights Templar had despatched back from their unenviable quest in The Holy Land.  Amongst the many victories that found them favour with the Pope and European monarchs, they detailed the possible existence of Undead Night Stalkers (us).

Those same kings and the Roman Church, who had endowed the Knights with blessings, refused to accept the existence of the supernatural.  It seems that to acknowledge our kind would mean The Church admitting to a race that transcended the corporeal.

To admit to creatures who had no use of salvation from the Saviour's most humane act was even worse.  That would necessitate acknowledging a race that lived on the other side of dawn, that was as old as the Egyptian Empire, at least.  Publicly admitting that powerful, Godless creatures existed would mean the beginning of the end of blind faith.

So, for me as a scholar, the absolute necessity to see where the ancient lines of the Ottoman Empire, Papal Empire and Wallachia had once lain side by side saw me travel to Eastern Europe one balmy autumn in my teens.

Once there, the residue of the ancients resonated in the air itself, turning the dry winds into a humid mask.  The spent forces of ancient warriors kicked up in every step of bleached sandy dust, their deeds etched into the very stone and fabric of that haunted place.  It wasn't hard to imagine saviours and devils, saints and sinners battling it out in this sun-blazed land.

14, d. More questions than answers (for now)

So, the point of this reverie into my life as a human?  Even almost 1,000 years ago, man's ancestors surmised that, without some scientific artefact to point to a true origin of the vampire race, there was no proof of our existence.

More likely, we were brushed aside back then as myth so as not to contradict kings' scholars.  To do so would smack of a treachery and lead to exile or death for those who professed to believe in our existence.

No, the ancient etchings uncovered in The Crusades, which implied the existence of the vampire breed, were dismissed as fanciful creations, a plaything devised to appease one lord or another.

But now, I know differently.  Not only do we exist, but we have also been busy in the shadows.  While humanity destroys itself beneath the sun they share, we have catalysed a genesis of our own underground.  Could it be that the Ark was responsible for this subterranean world's creation?

Imagine if humans found our kingdom here, right beneath their feet.  The possibility of immortality would no longer be consigned to legend, as was The Holy Grail and The Ark of the Covenant, for which the aforementioned Knights hunted for centuries in the name of God, His Holiness the Pope(s) and the Christian Church, allegedly in vain.  But now, I wonder.

Never forget, Vlad Țepeș was a Christian crusader himself, defending Wallachia from the Ottoman Muslims and occasionally the treacherous Hungarians.  His quest, and that of the crusaders of his day, some 100 years after the demise of The Knights, were supremely aligned.

Is it not conceivable, that he, Prince Vlad III Dracul, may have been the very defender of The Grail?  Did the Knights perhaps leave The Grail in Vlad's family's safekeeping as they got wind of the imminent treachery of the Roman Church towards their Order?

Or did Vlad's ascendants warn the Knights Templar that the Church was growing fearful of the them, that they were eclipsing the Catholic reign under Pope Clement V?  And, at the same time, that King Philip of France saw the Templar's amassed wealth as a way to rescue France from its massive debt?

What a weapon, a negotiating tool and a temptation The Holy Grail must have been!  The promise of immortality in return for fealty, and all it would take would be a sip from the same Chalice that would eventually find its way into the hands of Vlad III Dracula.

Was immortality enough of a bribe for the Knights to get them to write to Rome and France to say that their quest for The Grail and The Ark had been fruitless?

And was that the real reason behind the Knights' tremendous and public downfall?  Did their confessions to the Church and King Philip, extracted from them on that fateful Friday 13th in 1307 under extreme torture, have roots in truth?

Did the Templars indeed bow down to Eastern leaders and sacrifice babies to demons, perhaps as homage to The Order of the Dragon?  Not the Muslims, as suspected, but to the Wallachians, whose determination to keep the Ottomans at bay was greater even than the Papal empire's!!

Was the 'Son of The Dragon', a once celebrated hero of Christianity by kings and Pope Pius alike, a direct descendant of that long line of an Order, or even his own family, entrusted with the safekeeping of The Grail?

I think that Vlad III Dracula, unlike his forefathers before him, drank from The Chalice, making himself immortal.  All the while, he corroborated with other Christian elements to keep the Turks at bay under a pretence, knowing that he would eventually be betrayed by a fellow Christian he once thought an ally.

And once his position became untenable for the final time, he betrayed the ancient Order of the Dragon, making himself vampire through the sacrificial blood of innocents.  The first of The Brotherhood, through his absolute desire to see the Ottomans crushed, he subjected himself to a life eternal, forever to wait in the shadows for the chance to rid Europe and the world of the Muslims he despised so greatly.

If Vlad did indeed retain The Grail, was it within the walls of this vampire kingdom into which I was now descending, ensuring our longevity?

My gut had always told me he had, even before I became Brotherhood myself.  My instinct now told me that both he and it were hidden somewhere in this underworld.  In that moment, vindication of my life spent huddled over dusty tomes filled me with a contentment unparalleled with anything else I'd ever experienced.  But that fulfillment didn't last long.

Distracted as I was with my thoughts, I didn't notice that the sun, but for a fleeting moment, dimmed noticeably.  The clouds intensified, became denser still, casting argumentative shadows upon the ground far below us as they billowed and buffeted themselves, imploding, gambolling over and over in a frenzy.  That shadow, sensed rather than seen, had the effect of making me dismiss my chain of reasoning as unfounded, folly or coincidence, or all three broiled into one.

Upon reaching this conclusion, the clouds dispersed and the sun came out once more.  But far away on the shallow horizon, a sensational storm had started to stir.

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« « Chapter 13

Chapter 15 (W-I-P) » »

Billy Came, Chapter 13

13, a. A step back in time

Allow me to drag you into history a moment.  Mine, and the seemingly impossibile existence of another whose very reality was about to shape my existence forever.  As I stood upon that curling, ever-descending ivory staircase, looking down through the tumbling mist and out at the underground vista that rolled on and on unto a distant horizon, my thoughts began tumbling over themselves, jostling for prominence.  Right then, all the pieces of a jigsaw I'd been trying to piece together for as long as I could remember seemed to take shape, and form the big picture all at once.

To understand how those individual pieces came to be, allow me to give you an insight into the fascination that facilitated both Billy's initial courting of my soul and my subsequent transition into a vampire so seamlessly.

During the years I spent as a human (how easy it is to think of that in the past tense, already), I studied vampires with the gusto of a bumble bee fizzing at a fresh summer bloom, or at a highly polished window it refuses to see, despite bouncing off the glass a half dozen times before it realises its going to have to find another way back to the hive.

As a child, a pre-teen, I spent hours buried in the musty, forest-floor aroma of my local library and its limited offering of Gothic horror material.  At that time, we lived in a small suburb whose populace's aspirations scarce reached beyond a pint after the 9-5 or working the five-day shift, plus overtime on Saturday mornings (when the economy could support it) to afford a break in the sun once a year.  The demand for 100-year old horror was negligible against that background, and I soon exhausted the scant supply in the children's section.

During those junior school years, between 8-11 years old (Key Stage 2, Years 3 to 6 in today's money), I'd also spend Saturday nights with my nan (she on babysitting duty) in front of her small black and white TV.  We'd watch Tales of the Unexpected followed by a dip into the Hammer House of Horror vaults, she with her Bushmills, me with tea laced with a drop of that golden Irish elixir.

As soon as we heard granddad's key (eventually) find it's way into the front door lock as he, my mom and dad returned from 'The Rose', either my nan or I would leap up to quickly switch over to Match of the Day.  Buoyed with booze, my parents were never any the wiser to my nan and I's secret, indulged quite innocently as my sister slept soundly in her cot in the other half of the long walk-through living and dining room of their post-war end terrace.

The fact that being caught watching these films by my parents scared me more than any of those films and shorts themselves at that tender age said it all.  Yet make an impression, enthrall me with their legends they surely did.  They were the hook that snagged my imagination and tugged me on this lifelong journey into the macabre.

But even back then, I realised I had to get more creative if I was to satisfy this itch, whose root seemed to live directly beneath my skin.  Yet, no matter how many times I reread the limited material at my disposal, or watched the repeats with my nan, the itch never permeated the upper epidermis far enough for me to satisfy it, no matter how hard I scratched.

Based on the scant supply of (often censored) source material I could access to guide me, I felt that there was something 'off' with Pinewood's and Tinseltown's renditions of vampires on the big screen.  Thus, utterly convinced there was more to those myths, I decided to branch out.  But how could I get at such material?  This was, if I've not mentioned it, many years before the Internet.  More Starsky & Hutch and Northern Soul than Google, Facebook and Twitter.

I needed to look beyond the Makt Myrkranna (as yet unknown beyond Iceland) and its predecessor, which shaped the perception of the vampire for the whole of the 20th century.  As insightful, ground-breaking and romantic as Bram Stoker's novel is, he undoubtedly penned it 'of the time', and was driven (at least in part) by a sense of commercialism.  To rely solely on that text would seriously blinker my perception.

I have no doubt that Bram had a genuine desire to interpret the tales and legends from the mythical north—the land of the Vikings, their gods and spirits that fuelled enviable supernatural anecdotes, to which he travelled more than once—to a new audience.  His genius lay in that he chose a real Eastern European monster to relate the essence of those Nordic legends.  But, having found the perfect template in Vlad Țepeș, how could he not mix the romantic north and barbaric east in his mind once The Impaler had sank his teeth into Stoker's psyche?

I am also not in the least sorry that my formative years were too early for the shiny, chiselled 21st century vampires, whose eyelashes are longer than their fangs, who possess cheekbones you could peal potatoes on and flaunt bodies that have spent more time in a gymnasium than the entire Ottoman army put together.  Thankfully, back when I was at junior school, those vampires were still a long way off, the figment of an as-yet unborn marketing executive who held scant regard for the traditional blood-sucking ghoul.

At the time of my innocent, if not engrossed and burgeoning, passion for research, the type of vampires de rigeur in Hollywood ported receding hairlines that were scraped back into a fang-shaped 'V' above their forehead, waxed, bushy eyebrows and svelte midriffs held in tight by both cummerbunds and covert camera angles.

A little sexier than Nosferatu, mayhap, those Hammer vampires.  But they'd never hold a candle in the sex appeal department to the uber-buff Buffys', twinkling True Bloods' and voluptuous Vampire Diaries' vampires who would dominate the YA market at the turn of the 21st century as Dracula's descendents went dynamically and downloadably digital.

When these 21st century vampires came along, they became instantly forgetable. Had Bram Stoker needed to reduce his anti-hero to a powder-puffed Adonis to sell his story?  Absolutely not.  To me, 21st century vampires were little more than cheap vehicles whom schedulers used to carry adverts on commercial channels. Sordid, turgid, vapid, insipid and never should've did, in my humble opinion.

13. b, I've got a cute face and I'm not afraid to use it

But back to the past; one Saturday morning in the library, I found I'd read and reread all the material I cared to that was availed of minors.  After much consideration over what to do about it, as only a 10-year old can ponder such things, I ambled up to the reception desk.  As soon as one of the librarians was free, I asked her if I could see the 'adult' books on vampires.

Knowing the connotation of 'adult' now, I realise in hindsight why the young female attendant gave me such a shocked, if not amused, look in response.  I didn't know that she'd interpret 'adult' in an altogether different sense, just as I didn't know that if I'd have garnered a similar response from said female just a year later upon having been thrust amongst gaggles of new ones at senior school, I may have blushed the colour of a Remembrance Day poppy at her raised eyebrow and crooked little smile.  But like stardust on a twilight moon, her coy little look's sentiment was away, way, way over my young, Gothic horror-filled head.

To my good fortune, an older lady librarian—who 'did The Jumble' with my nan to raise funds for the Catholic church—overheard and understood what I wanted.  She finished with her customer and turned to look at me, not without concern, and asked, "What would your nan say about you reading that heathen nonsense, young Sebastian?"

I hesitated—only a second—before answering, "Actually, my nan has lots of books about horror.  James Herbert, Guyenne Smith, Rambey Camsell. 'Better the devil you know', is what she says, Mrs. Rogers." (Apologies to Guy N. Smith and Ramsey Campbell, but being in the spotlight at that moment confuddled my tongue.)  (Also, apologies to my nan, may she rest in peace, if my admission there got her into trouble with the church committee.)

Mrs. Rogers could tell I hadn't quite finished what I wanted to say by the shaping and reshaping of the muscles on my innocent little face.  She let me get my words in order and I eventually offered, "But I don't think nan lets my mom know I read them.  No, I don't think mommy would be very pleased at all if she knew.  You're not going to tell, are you, Mrs. Rogers?"  I flashed her my best blue-eyed, blond-haired smile, hoping to get her on board.

Mrs. Rogers, real name Kathleen, whispered something to her young colleague, whence they both tittered.  She then walked around the ancient, scarred grainy brown wood reception desk, her leading hand first, pointing palm down in my direction.

"Here's what we're going to do," she said, taking my hand in hers, "if you can promise to sit and stay in the quiet section of the children's library," (a newish room, a new initiative, but on the opposite side of the building to the main library), "and keep very, very quiet, you tell me what it is you want to read about, and I'll see what we've got and fetch it for you.  How does that sound?"

I nodded and bowed my head, as shy as you like and let her lead me away.  I am sure that the younger girl behind the counter saw me tuck a smug smile into my t-shirt pocket as I followed Mrs. Rogers out of the main room.

But there it was: the beginning of a learning curve of infinite proportions to scale between those New English Library and Pan paperbacks to where my journey of discovery would take me, to the here and now.  It would give you a nose bleed just thinking about it.

13, c. Getting the taste for it

My passion for vampires, beyond those creations warped by the minds of authors and directors alike, had to be satisfied somewhere.  The journey I eventually embarked upon forced me down the road of ancient tales and transcripts, those of the less documented histories of the vampire.

The first successful scratch that got beneath my skin did eventually happen in that little library in a town that's now all but a name on a junction on The Black Country Route spine road. The foundation had lain in the volumes that Kathleen Rogers, true to her word, stole into the children's section for me.  Bless.  But the cornerstones were about to be set in concrete forever.

Over those two years between 10 and 11, I must have read the very basics about every type of vampire, from almost every country in Europe.  Surface knowledge, nothing too in depth or, well, scary.

I also learned about a whole host of other supernatural beings whose legends were so deeply entrenched in the subcultures of the world's longest surviving tribes that they'd managed to survive almost to the end of the second millennium Anno Domini in tact, remaining as well known today as at their myth's inception.

What Mrs. Rogers fed me was enough to keep my interest alive, but deviated little from those monochrome Saturday nights sat with my nan in 'The House' or with Roald Dahl.  I built on those tales with books bought for me for birthdays and Christmas presents, a new direction that was neither football nor The Jam, so surprised my parents.

These gifts included, amongst others, collections of Poe and Lovecraft and a couple of St. Michaels' collections of '65 classic tales of the mysterious and supernatural' (the exact titles escape me), all written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the outbreak of the Great War.

Then there were the novels by new authors, the aforementioned Smith (werewolves, bats and crabs), Campbell (the supernatural, supported by the super application of simile, I mean, the absolute best) and Herbert (Rats, Fog and Rats again).

Then, when age 12 happened, everything changed, 'went up a gear', in the parlance of 21st century office managers everywhere.  I was thus allowed into the 'adult' section of the local library of my own accord and presented with a new library card confirming as much.  Oh, happy day!

I had, of course, seen the expanse of the adult section of the library from the reception desk many times over the years as I'd been checking out books from the children's section.  But it wasn't until I began wandering along its aisles on that glorious day that the true extent of its potential fell upon my shoulders like a comfort blanket (or 'sucky sheet', in the case of my sister).

Rows and rows of spines, mostly spinell black in the 'Fiction » Horror' section, glistened in their protective dust jackets beneath the stark fleet of industrial lighting that ever sailed, suspended high above, on an intermittent sea of a trillion dust motes.

Each author was not only offering a story, but also promising a whole new world, an invitation to the reader to step off this planet and into that author's very own mind.

For anyone to allow strangers that very personal privilege, I began to believe that all fiction authors must be a tad mad.  Especially horror writers, whose words spilled onto the page (mostly) from the sheer depths of their imagination for both reading pleasure and scrutiny alike.

True, something in real life must have planted the seed of their idea into their psyche.  But it was their imagination that nurtured that seed.  And then these authors allowed readers (and critics - boooo!) to see into that soup of intellect, the ingredients thereof a heady mix of the author's real life experiences and their interpetation of tales from the very depths of human depravity and twilight worlds.  To be judged on those bases?  Absolutely barking, all of them.

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« « Chapter 12

Chapter 14 » »

Billy Came, Chapter 12

12.a, Going Deeper Underground

The march along the claustrophobic, candle-flickering corridor from my bedchamber to an as yet undisclosed destination seemed endless.  The supernatural clamour came clambering at us in waves; it was never distinct, and often worklike, as if orders were being barked (and often met with reticent grumbles), but not all industrious.

You have to understand, vampire audio is something that humans can't conceive.  Humans typically hear soundwaves up to 20,000 hertz.  Dogs, on the other hand, hear up to 50,000 hertz; on paper, that's a 150% increase in noise.  But that's like calling the Titanic iceberg incident 'a bit of a leak'.

We, all of us, can differentiate sounds by where they peak on the spectrum; each peak, we associate with a different event.  A kettle boiling, the screech of brakes, the rumble of boots.  Each noise is a complex composition of layers of waves, all peaking and appearing on the spectrum at their own resonance.

So when I tell you that vampires can hear up to a minimum of 60,000 hertz—some of the older ones 80,000, so I'm told—you get an idea of the complexity of sound we can hear.  But the reality? Oh, you humans.  You'll never get it.

The depth of nature all around you that you neither see nor hear; it's truly incredible.  All you're conditioned to see is the trash humankind has built upon nature, the materialistic monstrosities that get in your way of seeing and hearing the beauty all around you. 

The distractions, sounds of emails and text messages pinging, the flickering of notes from ATMs, alarm clocks to awaken you because you're so out of sync with nature, Earth's time, that you're more like aliens than an indigenous species.  You walk around both deaf and blind to a world that could so easily send your souls soaring through the stratosphere!

And, yes, sorry.  I was a typical human, just like you, and only a few days ago.  My rant sounds hollow, hypocritical.  But I make no apology.

Before my humanity leaves me completely, as I know it must, given the evidence I've seen so far amongst my new Brotherhood, I must relate how we hear so well so that you can at least aspire to hearing nature more precisely.

Like dogs, our motives for survival are simple.  We rely on instinct, massively.  There are those who rely on it wholly, retaining no human mental capacity whatsoever; these are amongst the hordes of rogue vampires, who we in the Brotherhood try to rein in as best we can.  More of our methods in that regard, which are not pretty, will become evident to you shortly.

But for those of us vampires who do keep our wits (so far, so good for yours truly), a simplistic life frees up so much more of our brain's capacity, you would neither believe nor conceive.  Two dimensional, some may call it.  But it has its advantages.

We don't have to worry about the future, money, mortgages, viruses, how changes in the political arena will affect our sociological structure.  That structure, which some less learned fellows may call facism, also helps to keep us free, to keep our minds open and our senses more acute than the best of the rest that nature has to offer on this planet.

It's this new power, the acute sense of hearing, upon which I was relying whilst walking down the dingy corridor in a castle whose location I could hardly hazard to guess.  The voices I was hearing were not just from different social castes or levels of servitude, or even guests being waited upon.  The chatter also contained echoes from different times, overlapping each other, all wrapped up in cacophonous whirlwinds that berated our advance.

Then a thought came at me from leftfield, blindsiding me for an instant.  For all I knew, this was a trudge to the executioner's blade; the voices I heard were a gathering crowd drawn from across the ages to see the execution, a sacrifice, even!

But surely not! Hadn't Perveen already shown me too much loyalty, love, even, for me to truly believe that I was marching to my death? Yes, I believed-at that moment-that she had.

All I wanted was to get out of this dingy place; it felt more like walking along an underground railway tunnel than along a castle corridor.  If we had suddenly come upon stalactites, it would have been no surprise.  On second thoughts, walking along live tracks would have been preferable.

I'd begun to think the two goons Billy had left in charge of me had me walking on some unnatural treadmill, for all the progress we'd been making.  But then the rectangle of light eventually began to grow perceptibly larger; at last we were making headway, this constant frogmarch at last had a purpose, a destination.

12. b, A Void

I could make out a great double doorway, but we were still a little too distant, and beyond the door frame far too bright, to discern anything concrete about what awaited on the other side.

With this part of the journey getting closer to closure, the tension at last began to slip from my neck, nape and shoulders like a heavy velvet cape slowly sliding away, slipping to the floor. I turned around to try to gauge how far we'd come and noticed, with something of a shock, that Billy's cohorts had disappeared; in their place trudged two hooded henchmen.

The new duo still paced directly at my heel, one at each shoulder.  And the air of mutual mistrust remained, a tangible dislike that was evident despite the two new guards wearing hessian sacks over their heads with x's charcoaled onto the rough material where their eyes and mouths should be.  Their menacing appearance was reinforced by the pikes they each carried across their bodies, at least 7 feet tall, ending with a vicious point and razor-sharp blade, both of which glinted in the fluxing candle flame.

Even with the hoods and only the barest suggestion of signal activity from their brain, or aura or soul, or whatever it is we vampires read, one of the duo seemed familiar. True, I'd seen similar hooded forms at my sister's staged execution, that test of nerve Billy had set as part of the trial to assess my worthiness to become Brotherhood.  But these two weren't any from that very first night whence my belief in the world beyond the veil had been vindicated.

Having now had a little time to think for myself, I had wondered about that rite of passage.  At first, I had believed it simply to be an initiation into the vampire world.  However, events since landing 'behind the veil' had progressed so far so quickly that I was convinced my place here was not just as a monotonous monster, or simple slave of the night.

I had tried several times, all without success, to read Billy's cohorts' minds.  What were my chances of accessing whatever passed as the consciousness of these two new guards? To set my mind at ease yet further, I had to try to invade their minds.

The first thing I saw was that these were not vampires.  Not fully.  But they were not human, either.  Again, not wholly (and definitely not holy!).  Around their faces hung a vortex as black as night beneath those hessian hoods, impenetrable from here.  What I could ascertain—which, as far as I knew, was the extent of my fledgling power—was that even though their bodies were here, their heads were off and away in another dimension.

Perhaps whoever had decided that these two would accompany me had used this fascinating bit of sorcery as a safety precaution.  From what I'd learned from Perveen, the other dimension in which I believed their heads to be was not for the faint-hearted.  Was it worth me trying to peer into this void to try to access their thoughts? Every sense told me, No!

This time, I obeyed my senses.  I had by no means tested myself sufficiently; if there be monsters there—like the squid-vampires, or worse—I would be in all sorts of trouble.  Yes, it might only be my mind that I sent out there, but who was to say that there weren't entities existing in that vortex who couldn't cripple you with just a glimpse of your psyche, your soul?

I satisfied myself with the knowledge that their heads being so far away accounted for their clunky mannerisms, the lack of inherent agility that fully-fledged vampires possess and, much to my later regret, the way that one of them seemed off-kilter.

Somewhere in my subconscious, I also associated their presence with this abiding sense of universal tilt, a state that I'd still not been able to shake since recognising it in my boudoir.  Now, it seemed that everything that had purveyed since seeing Billy for the first time was somehow acted out against a thin theatrical backdrop.

I had first thought of this world as masking the world I'd been used to.  But now I was beginning to feel that the facade was hiding something a lot less substantial beyond the paper thin cloth of its fragile, or even virtual reality.  My personal sense of not belonging was heightening, as if I, and the one semi-familiar 'hoodie' now accompanying me, were from a distant life and did not fit or belong here.

As soon as that thought fully registered, the floor beneath my feet dropped away.  To be more specific, our feet had risen from the floor.  Within the same second, I was tilted backwards, as if being placed on an invisible sack truck.  In an instant, we were on the threshold of the light.  The doorway had still been some way off, and now we were there, in the click of a finger.

There had been no sense of acceleration on our part, just that odd fulcrum-shifting moment.  Was it coincidence, or had the very world sensed my doubting in its substance and sped to greet us with a party trick to convince me of its reality? Well, it worked.

12.c, Here Comes the Sun

Stepping into the light after such a long while in the dark, dismal corridor, I was momentarily blinded, so bright was the source's countenance.  What I saw once my eyes readjusted drove all previous thoughts from my mind.  I was utterly speechless, breath taken, dumbfounded, petrified.

We stood at the head of an impossibly long, steep spiralling staircase.  The ballustrade over which I took in the view and its banisters were the colour and texture of polished new ivory.  The stairs swirled down before us into a cloud-like mist before disappearing from view all together.

Sitting snug in the curve of the first full circle of the staircase, easily 50 feet in diameter, hung a blistering ball of light, whose surface swirled and eddied, making it seem alive.  Looking down directly at it was impossible; its rays were so bright and full of movement and energy, they made your brain hurt at just the merest direct glimpse.

How the giant globe was suspended (and powered) must have been at the behest of some secret sorcery, of which I was as yet unaware; no ropes, nor chains, nor electrical cords appeared to be attached at any point.  Yet there it hung, radiating light in all directions as far as the eye could see, up or down.

Looking up above also bent my mind.  The cavernous ceiling was incomplete, a hole like a chimney spouting upwards at its centre.  I say chimney; you could have probably driven a small submarine down it. 

Rugged, grey- and charcoal-coloured rock formed the inner wall of the chimney, spiralling up and away where the ornate ceiling decoration, in cornflower blue to mimic a sky, simply stopped.  Thousands and thousands of gemstones glittered from within the rock in which they were encased, and had probably been for millennia, as they peeped into the bristling rays of light.

But it was the chimney itself that was mind bending.  It stretched so, so far up and away that I could not determine its end.  But thanks to the globe below lighting up the gems in their seemingly infinite ascent, I could at least suppose that we were underground.  Yet here we were, above an obvious light source at the head of a gargantuan set of stairs, looking down onto clouds. Everything was the wrong way up.  No wonder I'd felt off kilter!

Whoever lived here, vampires, I assumed, had created their own sun, albeit an artificial one.  Were they to bask in its rays, it might neither shrivel their skin like parchment, boil their borrowed blood into steam nor blaze their bones to ash as the real thing is wont to do.

After looking down, then up again one more time, a sense of unease began to finger walk up my spine, sending a metaphorical shiver through my mind.  I conjected that one would not be able to discern that there was a chimney leading up from the ceiling at all, if looking up from the bottom of this staircase (wherever that was) from beneath this ethereal source of light.  One may glimpse the gemstones' reflections and think them stars, or the sky on the semi-ceiling if one looked closely enough, perhaps.  But the globe's sheer luminescence would prevent anyone beneath from seeing much beyond its aura of iridescence.

Although this was a magical sight to behold, it confirmed my conviction that all was not as it seemed.  How this new piece of the puzzle fit into that overall sensation, I could not yet tell.  But that sense of the skewiff was mounting, gnawing at my very core.

From behind, a nudge in the back got me going again.  Down.  We were going down through the clouds and into whatever world awaited there.  It was thence that the voices originated; as the cloud began to thin, the true volume of that din began to permeate the air.

Looking over the rail out of absolute curiosity, the mists parted as if for my sole (soul?) benefit, offering a view of the source of the excitement that had bathed us in chattering chitter as we'd trudged the never-ending corridor.  Approximately 150 feet below, maybe more or less, allowing for the bright light's distortion, a whole community was darting to and fro about what looked like an ancient Grecian courtyard.

The whole vista was suddenly bathed in light as the mists parted, the 'sun' creating and chasing shadows across the frantic scene before my eyes. The creatures beneath halted as one, pale faces and red eyes all looking up towards their 'sky' in unison, silence falling across the crowd.

It seemed they had been waiting for something to happen; I looked on aghast as every single being down there knelt on their one knee and thumped their left breast with the inside of their right fist, exactly as Billy had when he'd taken me to Perveen.  Was my presence what they'd been awaiting?

But that was to Perveen, an established vampire with wondrous powers.  Surely they were not saluting me? What had I done yet worthy of such obedience or adulation? Or maybe the pose had a double meaning, or was somehow different and I should be more concerned than I felt? Given the distance from me up here to them down there, it was hard to tell exactly.

What I knew for certain was that I would find nothing out waiting around up here.  I turned around to the two hoodies for affirmation, both of whom hung at my shoulders like parrots waiting for permission to land on their perch.

They moved together as if drawn by an invisible string to block off any chance of me retreating back into the corridor.  Not that I was even thinking it, but that did tell me one thing: whoever or whatever these two were, they hadn't got the clairvoyance gift and were unable to read my mind.

They poked the tip of their pikes into my breasts just to underline the point; I guessed that was my cue.  I set off down the ivory staircase, heading even deeper underground.  I was about to find out just how big the metropolis of Subterranea really was.  Nothing could have prepared me for what I found, not even if I'd had the blueprint.

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« « Chapter 11

Chapter 13 » » (W-I-P)

Billy Came, Chapter 11

11.a, The Bridal Party

(I narrate this passage as per details I latterly extracted from Perveen's and Marie's minds)

Perveen sat in her bed chamber staring, despairing into the ancient three-piece mirror that adorned her dressing table, Louis XV or XVI; old, kidney-shaped, with one large oval mirror in the centre, flanked by two identical miniatures on either side.  Charcoal-grey fissures fractured in lightning veins behind each glass surface; none had seen a duster in a century or more.

She was restless, anticipation making her anxious, nervy and snappy.  These were emotions she'd rarely experienced as a vampire; so rare, in fact, that her attendants were wholly unsure how they should react to their mistress in this mood.

Today, her attendants, twins by the name of Amelia and Marie, were adopting new roles.  As Perveen sighed at a reflection she couldn't see, one twin stood at each of her shoulders bedecked as bridesmaids, stroking gilt, pearl-handled hair brushes through either side of the vampire queen's sleek, ebony mane.

Billy Came, Chapter 10

Part Two | Subterranea: Vampire Central

10.a, The Boudoir of Big

I awoke from the doze on the winter bridge and immediately found myself in a state of agitation.  One moment, Perveen had been stroking my hair whilst my head flopped in her lap.  The next, I was here in an ancient bedroom on a sea of Jacquard quilt and what felt like feather down.  I had no recollection of events between that ice and snow extravaganza and waking here this very moment.

Looking up, I saw a broad rectangle of dusky rose silk sheets loosely drawn into a central point, giving the impression that I'd fallen asleep beneath a gigantic blush pumpkin.  Around me, netting hung down around me, following the shape of the rectangle above, obfuscating the view of whatever lay beyond.

It was the largest four-poster bed I'd ever seen and, in my current condition, alighting it provided a psychological step too far for my aching limbs. I managed to roll to the side of the bed that was letting in a cool twilight haze.  With only my head through the net, I got a better impression of the type of accommodation in which I now found myself.

As my senses had first stirred, I had assumed this place to be the mansion in which I'd last seen (and drank from) my brother.  But if anything, this room looked to predate that other to the point of being medieval.

Interest piqued, a rush of adrenalin (or whatever passes for that ambrosia in this existence) stirred my mind and limbs.  With trepidation, I dragged the rest of my body to a sitting position on the edge of the huge bed, the nets draping about my shoulders like a cape.  My feet didn't even touch the floor, lightly swinging a good six inches above the grey-flagged stones.

I drop/slid myself off the bed, expecting the stone to chill my soles, but no.  Retaining an ambient temperature no matter the weather was taking some mental adjustment.  Odd that I'd assimilated so much else, more horrific beings and concepts, without blinking an eye, yet couldn't fathom this most basic of changes.  What Freud would have said about my state of mind prior to becoming vampire, I really didn't want to guess.

Shadows danced and jumped against walls from banks of candles. Dozens of them, of many heights and thicknesses and all of the same sickly yellow, bone-coloured ivory hue.  The biggest were on wall sconces, others were on the mantle of an inglenook fireplace, whilst others simply sat in random arrangements along the bottom of the walls.  The waft of jasmine rose subtly on their flickering flames to impart an air of the outside.

It was pleasant enough, but did little to dispel the sense of claustrophobia I had felt in the bed and, to an extent, whilst at the mercy of both Billy and Perveen as they'd got into my mind at different turns.  Enough of the maudlin; it was time to explore!

As I emerged from the net, I spied another source of light; this was an arrowslit in the exterior wall, which, like the scale of everything I'd seen thus far, was mammoth.  The embrasure was at least a yard-and-a-half wide and 12 feet tall up to its 'bishop's hat' peak, only short of the ceiling because the room was so tall, and all but imperceptibly level with the floor at its base.  I was by no means small and I could have just walked straight through the gap into the twilight air without brushing the sides.  Perhaps whoever had built this fortification had meant to defend its walls with cannons instead of bows.

I moved into the gap to take in the view before either nighttime or the artificial glow of the candles stole it.  The landscape that greeted me was nothing like that which Perveen had plunged into a winter wonderland from the bridge last night.  The instant impression it gave me was "The Wasteland(s)" - Eliott or King, take your pick.  This was the violet hour, underlined on the far, far horizon by a thick dirty electric yellow hue.

The sky between here and there was crammed full of seething storm clouds, which looked ready to shed their burden at a hiccup.  So low and full were their bellies, I wagered that if I leapt hard and high enough, I'd burst one before gravity pulled me home.

Gripping the outer bottom ledge of the arrowslit with my toes, I looked down to see exactly where it was gravity would take someone foolish enough to leap at the sky from here.  Many, many storeys down resided a moat.  But instead of water, it was filled with sharp-end-up wooden spikes of varying girth, wood and height.

There was a significance in the water being absent, I was sure, but wooden spikes seemed an odd choice of protection for a vampire, for surely a vampire was my ultimate host.  Perhaps the cannon-wielding architect of this fortress had been trying to keep our kind out. No such joy, it seemed, in this time and place.

I could sense other vampires and ambiguous vapid forms roaming the rooms and corridors beyond my room.  The distances and strengths of those others' 'signals' gave me a size of the place.  I was either interpreting the input incorrectly, which was highly possible, or this castle, fortress, whatever it was, happened to be the size of a small metropolis.

That brought me around to considering why I was here, where here was and what was the protocol that a guest vampire must observe?  There was no chance I was leaving the room of my own volition.  I took one last sniff at the air and fell back into the room, taking the measure of it all for the first time.

The four poster's curtains were woven with the same filigree as the quilt, an ivory weave on dense red scarlet material.  I have no idea what the material was, other than old.  The long, thick curtains, which dropped the full 10' of the bed, were secured to the posts themselves with a richer ivory, almost bronze, rope cord whose tassels splayed across the granite floor.  Everything was tucked in tidily at the end of the bed by an ottoman, whose size would have accommodated two oarsmen if you ever had the urge to set sail in it.

It was all very grand, even if it wasn't exactly me.  But there was something else that bothered me. The atmosphere felt…mm, tilted, off.  It was as if the fulcrum of reality had been shifted, causing everything else to attempt to regain composure and a sense of equilibrium, albeit unsuccessfully.  I began to feel uneasy, very much the state I sensed the world into which I’d awoken to be in, too.

10.b, Flames of Wrath

In the wall opposite the bed stood a huge hearth and fireplace, filled with logs and kindling ready to be lit.  Not for my benefit, obviously.  Out of sheer curiosity I bent over the logs and into the nook to get a better look at the chimney.  Not only did it go up for many a storey, but it also plunged down into a blackness that not even my eyesight could fathom.

Travelling up and down the chimney were the echoes of voices, dozens of them.  Chatter and commands, dreams and nightmares, laughter and despair, whispering and screaming; it was a cacophony of life, some of which I got the distinct impression had passed on many, many decades hance.  If the flue system ran horizontally as well as vertically, who knew how long the reverberating voices had been rattling around the old place?

Still somewhat weak from the kiss of the vampire, a wave of giddiness washed over me as I pushed myself up from the hanging stance I'd taken to look into fireplace.  I walked gingerly to the ottoman opposite and sat down, turning back to face the unlit fire.  What a boon it would be to light it, even if the flames would add little more than an aesthetic!

Beside the mantelpiece sat a cluster of candles in a semicircle, scaling in height to look like a miniature amphitheatre.  I crouched to pick up the tallest one, mindful of the flame, which surprisingly repulsed me.  For a second, anger flared in the front of my brain; before I had a chance to curse my stupidity, I could have sworn I saw the kindling catch.

As I put the candle back in place, I heard the familiar snap, crackle and pop of dry tinder catching light.  I then imagined the fire roaring and, to my total amazement, the first fierce tongues of fire began licking the lower logs.  All of this without so much as a hint of the alighted wick I'd just replaced going near the wood.  What a power this was!

All at once, a calm settled over me.  A stamp of humanity in this stark place, perhaps?  I scraped a piece of solidified wax off my thumb into the fire and resolved to carry on searching the room.

In the corner of the interior wall, opposite the arrow-cum-cannon-slit, stood a grandiose cupboard or wardrobe of indeterminate age.  Next to that, a dressing table.  Then finally, standing just before the door out of the bedroom, a small wooden rack ported several pairs of fine velvet slippers on the top row and leather boots beneath.

I couldn't help it.  I had to try the shoes on, and then any clothes I might find in the wardrobe.  What else was a man with only one set of clothes to his name and time on his hands to do?

At first, I doubted that anything would fit.  Upon opening on of the wardrobe's huge creaking doors, it seemed that everything on the rack—and there was a fair choice—looked tiny.  Perhaps it was the setting they were in, the size of the wardrobe itself, that made them look so small because, as I tried each item on, everything seemed to grow on, or rather, with me.  And each piece was exquisite in detail, made of only the finest materials.

The style was turn of the century - the 20th century.  The exterior garb—long-tailed jackets, trousers and heavy overcoat—were formal, made up in sombre colours.  The waistcoats, shirts, cravats, their pins and cufflinks, however, were the counterpoint.  Every colour of the rainbow hung or glistened in boxes (hidden in the dressing table drawers) to bring personality to the wardrobe.  There was even a gold-topped walking cane to complete the dandy look.  I had never looked so dapper.

Whatever I had been brought here for, I was now ready.  I looked the part.  And despite my belly gnawing itself, I felt more composed than I had since laying my eyes on Billy for the first time proper.  I sat on the ottoman waiting and got lost in the flames.

With my mesmeric attention fixed on the burgeoning bonfire, I heard the heavy bedroom door open only on a subconscious level.  A breeze from the corridor outside stirred the candles and fanfare of flames in the hearth, casting shadow hither and thither.  Sooty shapes played out battle scenes around the chimney breast and along walls, and I followed them until they disappeared into the deepening shadows of the furthest corner of the room.

For a second, I thought I could make out another door tucked away in the murk that I must have somehow overlooked while exploring the room.  Or maybe I'd been so excited by the wardrobe, I'd opened its huge door without fully exploring that little corner beyond it.

Before I had chance to investigate properly, I heard the main bedroom door's latch clack shut behind me.  The shadows suddenly stopped dancing, drew together as one and retreated, plunging that corner into pitch blackness.  I couldn't say whether I’d made out a door jamb over there for sure, but it was too late to delve any deeper.  My attention was now diverted to the party that had inadvertently entered the room: Billy and his, by now, two familiar cohorts.

In his fashion, Billy spoke no words, but made it crystal clear that I had to leave with them; his two wingmen parted for me to lead on between them. Had they been waiting for me to wake and smarten up before calling on me?  Of course they had.

The corridor ahead, lit with infrequent torches all along its length, stretched out before us, culminating in a tiny rectangle of light, way off in the distance.  It was a true lesson in perspective, all around.

From the direction of that pin-prick of light, I fancied I heard the clamour of a busying crowd come rolling towards us bouncing off the corridor walls.  It sang of industry, much like the clatter of the school kitchen heard from a nearby classroom as staff prepare for lunchtime.  But surely that was not it.  Perveen had said I'd feast, but I took that to mean…

I turned to seek some sign of reassurance from Billy, but he was no longer there.  Only his trustees stood in the wavering darkness, one at either shoulder behind me in the claustrophobic corridor. 

As I turned to see which way he'd gone,  I saw that the corridor stretched back just as far the other way, if not further, than the way we were headed. The two equally silent bodyguards nodded in unison towards the ghostly sound of the workhouse kitchen, undulating on the same wafting breezes that unsettled the torches in their sconces.  Somehow, I was disappointed that the draught did not bring with it the odour off goulash or chocolate brick and mint custard.

A prod in my back refocused my attention.  I don’t know what I’d done to upset these two fellows, but their hostility was palpable; I don't mind admitting, neither did I much care for them.

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Chapter 11 » »

Billy Came, Chapter 9 (End, Part One)

9.a, Ice on Fire

The very water that idled beneath the bridge began to crackle and freeze under the command of Perveen's hand motion.  At her behest, a plateau of ice began streaking across its surface in tortuous lightning patterns, assimilating quicksilver in both look and speed.

On either side of the bridge, the grasses and trees, brickwork and fretwork grew fast-forming frost that solidified before my awe-struck eyes.  Every surface was sprouting white crystalline spikes, growing at all angles and on top and beneath and through one another.

It was like watching timelapse footage of ivy clambering upwards on an invisible frame: columns of crackling, twisting ice—fibrous chords, wrapping around each other into ropes—reached skywards of their own accord as if seeking and finding succor on a supernatural support.

Billy Came, Chapter 7 (b)

7.b, Time to Meet My Maker

Following a manic flight across the twilit rooftops, Billy and I descended to terra firma.  No heroics nor tests this time; this was getting down to the business that had been in the making for who knew how many years.  Nor were there any mortals we would potentially petrify to greet our landing.  We dropped beside a quayside factory in virtual silence, just the fluttering of our clothes protesting against gravity announcing our arrival.  In the failing light, the total lack of activity put you in the mindset that you may find the Marie Celeste moored anywhere alongside the quay.

This was unlike anywhere Billy had brought me to yet.  The atmosphere was different; something here was making me edgy.  We had landed like spies on a behind-enemy-lines mission in a foreign land.  It did feel alien, the whole place.  From its silence to the air of expectation, it was like nothing—or nowhere—I'd experienced before.  But, yes; the frosty air was crackling, as if the microscopic flakes of ice in the atmosphere were carrying a charge pregnant with shock!

In even more reverent silence, we turned right off the quayside and headed into what looked like a little town.  Little, and old, very much Victorian in its outlay and buildings.  Billy took us along the first lane off the square, which was monopolised by an ugly cenotaph that seemed to have been built around the town clock.  The clock looked old, ancient almost; it managed to maintain a certain grandeur, albeit with a hint of embarrassment that some fool after one of the World Wars had thought it a good idea to honour the town's dead with a block of unsightly concrete.

The lane itself was no more comforting.  Tall 3- and 4-storey buildings craned high above, like skeletons forming a guard of honour for any unfortunate passing pedestrian.  Thankfully, the cobbles didn't extend very far and we were out in the open again in less than a minute.  The buildings here were more tasteful, the highest 2-storey and spread out to welcome and ingratiate the countryside, before exiting in what looked like a main road that could lead anywhere.

Billy tugged my shirt collar so that I was looking roughly back in the direction of whatever sea abutted this part of the world.  I wouldn't honestly have been able to swear that we were even still in England, had it not been for the cenotaph and crumbling architecture.  Billy leading, keeping me at his back, we approached the small lane leading to the foot of an ancient stone footbridge, which spanned one of the harbour's small tributaries.  At its crest, a small gang of creatures, all adorned in black, were paying court to a slip of a girl.

The scene reminded me—and I don't know why—of one of the Gospels. 'The Finding', when Mary and Joseph inadvertently left a 12-year old Jesus in the synagogue, whereupon he debated with the elders for three days after Passover.  Was this girl, whose word the crowd followed to the letter, also 'in [her] Father's house?"  On some level, I knew this to be true.

The girl sat back on the apex of the bridge's thick-but-decrepit wall, hands and arms splayed either side of her in a picture of effortless relaxation.  From here, her face was in shadow, as was the host of followers crowding around her.  A short skirt displayed a tasteful length of her thick-stockinged, crossed legs, while a thick cape covered her shoulders, upper arms and torso.  To my eyes, a pleasure to behold.

Many of her attendants looked much older than she, older than me.  Had I misread the situation; perhaps she was in trouble?  My mind was racing in a thousand different directions at once.  Was this why Billy and I were here, to save her?

As we drew closer, still clinging to the shadows, it became apparent that this seemingly fragile figure was a young lady who'd not quite blossomed into full womanhood.  If you accepted that she was likewise a vampire—the longer I was in the place, the more convinced was I that this was not a place for mortals—then she was unlikely to ever physically reach full bloom.  How treacherous!

Even so, she was a being of pure beauty, and not just because of her eye-searing looks, which were becoming more apparent the closer we got to, what I assumed was, our quarry.  I also tried to bend my vision to get a better view, but it—for whatever reason—didn't work on her.

Something in the easy way she held herself belied her youthful appearance.  Whether she was currently in danger or in charge of her situation, and I was now leaning towards the latter, she commanded your full attention.

In the dim light, cast by a myriad random old-fashioned gas street lamps, any sense of true colour was lost against the night.  It was only when we got to the very foot of the bridge that I saw enough to suspect that this woman—exuding influence that orbited her like some mystical, tangible aura—had been Asian when she was alive.  I say 'had been' only in the sense that I'd stopped thinking of myself as half-Irish the moment I'd been turned vampire.  I was 'vampire', end of story.  What was past was past; only the future had meaning now, or so I thought.

At last, Billy stepped out of the shadows and, boldly, approached her court.  I jogged to keep up and, as we approached, the small gathering parted; to a man, they backed away and bowed down on one knee, supplicating before him.

Now, I was confused.  Even moreso when Billy moved through the pathway they'd created and assumed the same position himself before the young lady on the bridge wall.  It was odd seeing this powerful brute lay himself almost prostrate, but in the setting, somehow fitting.  It conveyed fierce loyalty that was almost fearful to behold.

When I eventually stopped my gaze from flitting between Billy and the lady whom he was apparently worshipping as if I was enthralled by some nighttime tennis match, I wondered if I should do the same.  But this girl-on-the-wall's hazel eyes shifted from Billy and locked onto me, holding me rapt; they bore a path through the whorling, frosty night air into (what passed for) my very soul.

Her gaze engaged mine, not meaning to let go.  In the instant the connection was made, memories of my childhood began to flood my mind.  The memories were mine, but…but, not mine.  There was no power of suggestion at play, here, either.  I could not possibly have conjured the passage playing out in my mind's eye as I was the object of these memories, the perspective from a viewpoint that wasn't mine.

This one memory was a football match from my schooldays. My (then) white-blonde hair was cut in the wedge style (or basin-cut, if you prefer).  My whole scalp bounced like a jellyfish in full flight as I jogged back to my half after scoring a goal.  In this replay, I stopped mid-jog to stare at the touchline, as if beckoned, and into whoever's eyes had captured these memories.

Caught on camera, the present me was looking directly into the eyes of the younger me, staring back through the host's eyes through time at this future me.  Quite willingly, I sauntered to the touchline, towards the very eyes through which present me was viewing this replay.

Whoever it was who owned these eyes whispered unexpected—and now memory-worn and incomprehensible (but deep in my subconscious, memorable!)—encouraging, praising words as, against the blurred backdrop beyond my very young face, the two football teams took their positions ready for kick off.

In the now, in this alien place, this intrusion into my past had me petrified.  Awe, fear, recognition and a whole load of pennies dropping somehow combined to catapult my mind beyond the reaches of all time and space.  The message that the younger me conveyed back to the owner of these eyes in this memory had likewise become garbled over time, their peaks and troughs erased like a rough diamond left to the mercy of the sea for a thousand years.

Whatever short-but-pleasant passage passed between us had made us laugh, our hands touched ever-so lightly as I, chest puffed out like a rooster, turned and jogged back to take up my own position on the pitch.

But it wasn't the words that were important.  I didn't need to hear what we said.  It was the intent, so sincere, almost loving (as much as 10-year olds can fall in love), and so obviously not forgotten by the host that was important, both then and in this setting in the here and now.

Through her eyes I stared back into my own as they were then, bright blue, open to everything and anyone.  The memory harked back to a time when I knew not what innocence meant, yet possessed it in abundance.  And, at last, the memory came back to me whole, struggling to rise up through the masses of new memories that Billy had so recently given me.

It was Perveen.  She was younger then.  But the moment I remembered everything, I could see her in the girl who was now sat up straight on the bridge wall, forearms criss-crossed in her lap, waiting.  The instant I made the connection, the leap, she closed down the transmission, the green fields disappearing in a kaleidoscope, swirling around until all that was left was my blue eyes in the centre of this ethereal screen, before they too disappeared, shrinking to nothing like the closing dot of a cathode-ray TV before the screen went blank entirely.

Off the crumbling wall she skipped, running past Billy and through the crowd of worshippers to take my hand.  It was as if she had been sat there for years, but how could that be so?  She had grown, and some, since that memory was made.  But, it seemed, she had been brought over into this other world sooner than I.

How much sooner, I tried to guess.  I was almost 30.  I guess I'd never get to that milestone, now.  Now, there was a thought.  She and I were in the same class, infants and juniors; but we'd become separated later at senior school.

After that touchline exchange, we had become the closest of friends through the remainder of junior school and into the early years of senior school.  But, after we had taken our 'options', what then?  Fate took us in different directions and the trail of our history just truncated in my mind.  That was, until our Prom night, my last (living) memory of her.  We hadn't attended as a couple.  She had simply become one of 300 or so peers who'd graduated that year who I'd not laid eyes on since.

And now, she was the Master?  I could not conceive it.  But low grumbling from the down-turned heads behind us, aghast that I should question such, confirmed that it was so.  So, they could hear my thoughts, too?  Was nothing private, here?

She smiled with her mouth, beamed with her eyes and her body shimmered with an ecstasy I didn't comprehend.  Looking after me here was her duty, her chosen duty.  I somehow knew that, now.  But it was a task she would relish, and had waited more than a decade to undertake.  She would take me under her wings, as I had seemingly done so for her all of those years ago at school.

Remembering that now cast a dark cloud over my psyche; how soon we pick up and drop friends when we're young.  So much to see and learn at that age; everything is new.  We bend like the proverbial green reed in the wind, following other kids who share a passion for our next fad, caring nought for those we leave behind.  We do not once consider that their interest in that foresaken passion was because it was ours, and not the fad itself.  What happened to all those people we leave in our wake, and not just in childhood, clutching to a memory like a drowning man clutches to a buoy in a restless sea?

Perveen's rough palm cut through my maudlin wallowing.  It cupped my cheek as best it could—her hands were so delicate and tiny—and turned my face to look down into hers. In that instant, we were back in that touchline moment in childhood, the way our eyes had met then without a care.  For an instant, I felt I would drown in the love that came swimming back up at me.

I broke the gaze, gasping.  Her look was all tenderness and understanding, but demanding that I look again, all the same.  I was powerless to do otherwise.

We strolled down the opposite side of the small hump-backed bridge whence Billy and I had approached, leaving the others behind.  They began to stand now that their Lady had dismissed (or forgotten) the court.  She was all mine.  Or, rather, I was all hers, and she had another type of courting on her mind.  What little I thought I had left to give, she could have willingly.

My induction with Billy was over.  He had served both his queen and I well.  But this was only the beginning.  Perveen was about to show me how much more there was to give, even in this undead life, and in exactly what manner it should be imparted.  And received.  And, as it turned out, in ways that only a madman would ever conceive.

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