30 Days of Night: Fear of the Dark

8

MARTY FELT LIKE SHIT. It was like the worst hangover he’d ever had. Everything around him had taken on a piercing tint, the artificial light bright and sharp as glass shards. He squinted, but that only tensed his face and made it ache. It reminded him why he never got drunk anymore.

“Bastard,” he said for the tenth time.

“He’s had a hell of a shock,” Rose said. “You’ve got to allow that.”

“He was ready to kill you!”

“Well, I am a vampire. Killing vampires is his raison d’être.”

“I thought you said you were a Humain.”

“Murderers and pacifists are still both human.”

They were sitting in one of the well-appointed, barely used downstairs rooms. They sat on either side of the huge, cold fireplace, in high-backed chairs that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Sherlock Holmes’s study. The large kitchen was through an open doorway, and the rest of the walls were lined either with bookcases or framed paintings of London landscapes. Most of the pictures were old and dusty, some of the canvases torn and tattered in places. The books were the sort Marty had seen in stately homes when his parents used to take him and Rose on day trips—thick, elaborately bound tomes in Latin or French, their contents long since lost to obscurity. They were decoration, nothing more. The books Lee used for his day-to-day obsession were in his office upstairs, stacked on a couple of old oak desks or piled on the floor beside his computer station. Marty had seen at least three copies of a book called 30 Days of Night, one of them torn up with pages reshuffled, marked, highlighted, and labeled.

They’d left Francesco and Lee up in the study. Rose said it was because they wanted Marty away from there; he’d had a traumatic time, and more talk of vampires could be damaging to him. But he wasn’t stupid, and he’d already seen and sensed the truth. Francesco had no space in his heart for a troubled human, not compared to the other challenges facing them now. They just didn’t want Marty to hear too much.

“He really never knew?” Marty said.

Rose shrugged.

“You only ever met him at night?”

“We were all doing this secretly. We had lives to lead. So he thought.”

“He’s passionate about this.” Marty held his head and closed his eyes, smelling once again the powerful, nose-burning stench of the chloroform. “You sure he’ll keep his word?”

“Of course. Francesco and I are his regular contacts. But he’s also met Jane and Patrick, and he knows there are others. Now he knows we’re all… Humains.”

“And his garlic and holy water don’t work.”

Rose giggled. Marty’s eyes snapped open. That sounded so much like his sister—like the old Rose. She broke off, no longer smiling, and looked at him, and perhaps an old memory of how things had been had struck her as well. How different she must be, he thought. It was terrifying.

“I’m amazed he was that naïve, actually,” she said. “The ways to kill vampires are far less fanciful.”

“What are they?” Marty asked. He was holding his head, eyes half-closed, and it took a moment for the heavy silence to impress itself upon him. He froze and looked at Rose. She was glaring at him. “What?”

“Never ask that again,” she said softly. “Understand? One of the others hears you asking that and…” She looked away.

“Sorry,” Marty said. He was upset that Rose could even think of things that way, but perhaps he was forgetting the dire situation he was in. Behind his headache lay the terrible grief, still a solid wall of darkness surrounding him but not yet crushing him down. Shouldn’t I be crying? he thought. Useless? Unable to function? But he remembered when his mum’s mother had died when he was ten, and he’d asked her why she wasn’t crying. I’m crying inside, she’d told him. Everyone handles grief differently. I loved her deeply, and there are no doubts about that, so I’ll not feel guilty that I’m not a useless crying mess right now. And if tomorrow I am one, I won’t feel guilty then, either. At the time he’d found some of that difficult to understand: when someone died on TV, everyone who knew them cried and held each other and wailed. But he’d come to learn that not everything was like on TV.

“So, what happens now?” he asked.

“For tonight, we stay here. Patrick, Jane, and Connie are out in the streets, in other parts of London.”

“Why?”

“Decoys, in part. And also trying to find out more about the vampires, and their numbers.”

“You think they know about Lee?”

“If they did, we’d have found that out by now.”

“So they don’t know where this Bane thing is, then.”

“Not sure,” Rose replied. “We know so little.” She seemed to be looking past Marty, and he saw the distance in her eyes that set her apart from the sister he’d once known. He had to keep reminding himself that this was no longer the Rose he knew and loved. She was someone else who had his sister’s memories, something else making new memories of its own.

“I don’t know what to do now,” he said softly. “People’ll be looking for me, right? Family and friends. The house is burnt, and the cops’ll be looking too.”

“We’ll work something out.”

Marty thought about that. We’ll work something out. What was there that they could work out? It seemed quite clear from Francesco’s attitude that Rose shouldn’t have anything to do with him. He had no idea what was going to happen in the next five minutes, let alone five days or five years. What could they possibly… ?

But there was that one thing he’d been thinking about. The thing that made his once-special sister so special again.

“We could.” He stared at her until she caught his eye.

“What, Marty?”

“We could work something out.” He was fingering the collar of his shirt, thinking, What am I doing? But the idea had been with him for a while now. Certainly since he’d woken and crawled downstairs to warn them that Lee knew. And in truth, from the moment he’d seen Rose fighting off that thing that attacked him—her strength and power, grace and brutality—the idea had been with him, though subconsciously at best.

Rose moved. He was shocked by her speed: one moment she was in the chair opposite him, the next she filled his field of vision, her face pressed so close to his that he thought she was going to kiss… or bite.

“You have no fucking idea,” she said. “Listen to me, Marty, and make sure you listen well…” She trailed off for a moment and she was still there, the only thing Marty could see, and he could smell her, too… nothing like his sister.

“R-Rose…”

“Your mother’s dead. You’re alive. I’m neither. I can’t begin to make you understand what that means, but I can try. And if you trust me, you’ll pay attention. Do you trust me, Marty?”

“I don’t want to hear—”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes. I trust you.”

“Okay, then. Here goes. Some days I drink rats’ blood. I hunt them down in sewers and tube stations. They eat dead things down there, and live in the shit and piss of six million Londoners, and I drink their blood. It’s stale and rancid, but it’s warm, and it’s food. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, Patrick will score a hit on a blood bank. He has his ways and means, which he refuses to tell us, but he’ll come back with bags of the good stuff, freely given. That makes us strong. But sometimes it tastes too good. So then it’s back to the rats, and sometimes a cat or a dog if I’m really lucky.

“You’re seventeen and you’ve already seen too much. But time will dilute all this awful stuff. You can look forward to so much more than me, Marty. When the sun rises tomorrow, you can go outside and walk through the streets, seeing London as it’s meant to be seen. The parks, the architecture, the people. One day you’ll fall in love and feel the warmth of someone’s heart thudding beside your own. You’ll make love and have children…” She trailed off again, but she was still pressed too close for Marty to see her expression.

“But you’re so removed,” he said softly. “You live by your own rules, do what—”

“No! I live by rules my condition demands. I’ll never walk in sunlight or fall in love. You can relish life, Marty, but I can only crave the blood of the living.”

“But you said you—”

“We go against our base desires. It’s a choice we make, and a good one. But the hunger’s always there.”

Marty turned away, angry at Rose for telling him so much. “I’m not a fool. I don’t see glamour. But I also don’t see what I have left.”

“Choice,” Rose said. Marty felt a breeze against his cheek, and when he turned back to Rose she was sitting in her chair again, as relaxed as if she hadn’t moved at all.

“You’ve made a choice as well,” he said.

Rose sighed and shook her head. “You’re so fucking human.”

“Thanks, Sis.” He looked for a smile but there was none; Rose’s face was as grim as ever. So he closed his eyes instead, the headache still throbbing and his throat dry and sore. And he thought of his dead mother and missing father, and what was left behind for him.

Not much.

He held back the tears, but he was crying inside.

She carried him up to a bedroom and laid him out on a bed, her baby brother who was now slightly taller than her and so much more vulnerable. He was awake as she left the room but they didn’t exchange a word.

She performed a circuit of the house, checking the window and door locks, amused to see the little crosses fixed across each frame, but a little saddened as well. Lee had been leading what he thought was such an honest, responsible life, and now all that had been turned upside down. He was a ruined man making the most of what he had left, and they had misled him for longer than she had known him. He’ll do well by us now, she thought. But she couldn’t help but feel anything except doom in the man’s future. His life had gone through upheaval ten years before, and now they had shattered it again.

She called Patrick, Jane, and Connie on their mobile phones. Patrick was in Covent Garden, hiding amongst the crowds. Jane was wandering the East End, and Connie was walking circuits around Hyde Park, edging out into the surrounding streets and back again. None of them had sighted anything suspicious, and if any of them were being followed, it was covertly. Rose arranged to meet back underground before dawn, then went to find Francesco.

He was sitting in Lee’s office. Lee was on his computer, surfing websites, tapping away at the keyboard, and Rose could see the tension in his shoulders.

“Marty’s sleeping,” she said to Francesco.

“Fine.”

“I can’t just leave him to them, you know. Not after what’s happened. They’ll track and kill him just out of revenge.”

“Maybe.”

“In fact, it’s more likely they’ll turn him. Even better revenge. And with everything he knows about us—”

“I’ve already thought about all of that, Rose,” Francesco sighed. “We can’t let them find him or turn him. He stays with us until this is over.”

“And when will that be?”

“Lee?”

The ex-SIS man glanced back over his shoulder at Francesco and Rose.

“I’m not a fucking miracle worker.”

“Fine. Keep looking, dickhead.”

Lee turned back to the screen and opened a new window.

“Might be nicer if we could all get along,” Rose said.

“He shot me with a crossbow.” Francesco sounded grim, but Rose knew that this was as close to amused as he ever got. Toying with the human pet.

Rose sat on one of the chairs in the corner and leaned back, staring at the ceiling.

“So they knew the Bane was in London, but not where. And they assumed we knew where it might be?”

“Seems logical. There are others like us around the world. Stands to reason the vampires know our outlook, and if they have tracked the Bane this far, where better to go than to those who’d seek to keep it hidden?”

“They could have just asked.”

“Not a vampire’s style,” Lee said. “They’re all mad as a box of fucking frogs.”

Francesco snorted.

“And they smell,” Lee continued.

“We fooled you, dickhead.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He tapped away some more on his keyboard, and Rose couldn’t help admiring him. He’d adapted quickly to knowing the people he’d talked about vampires with for so long were vampires themselves. Maybe some of that had to do with their Humain philosophy; she hoped so, because it meant he was believing them. Or perhaps he was simply being defiant.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“What I always do,” Lee said.

“Sure you’re not just emailing some of your old mates at SIS?”

“And saying what? ‘Help, come and rescue me from a family of vampires that are holding me hostage’?”

“He knows he’d be dead before they broke down the door,” Francesco said.

“If that meant they get to kill you all, wouldn’t bother me. But if the Bane’s out there, and so are those other monsters…”

“We’re on the same side,” Rose said.

“Until this is over, yeah.”

Rose went to stand behind Lee and tried to make out what he was doing.

“So?” she asked.

“Message board, mainly German,” he said, pointing to one of the open windows. “It’s a place others like me sometimes leave messages. This one over here is a word usage filter: a sort of advanced search engine, with a whole host of search parameters. I put in all the relevant words I can think of—Bane, London, Marty, Rose, Humain, Spanish, Francesco, Connie, Patrick, Jane, fucking vampire shitheads—and it’ll search the net for any and all combinations.”

“This one?”

“Porn. Need to keep my feet on the ground.”

“Really, what is it?”

Lee paused, betraying his humanity. “You probably don’t want to see.”

“Open it up.”

Lee shrugged and expanded the window. It was a slide show of photographs of a place she’d once known so well: home. Most of them showed the blackened remains of the fire, but here and there were close-up shots of cooked meat and charred bones, and one featured a skull with false teeth melted into a surreal, grotesque mask across its lower jaw. They were graphic and honest, not the sort of filtered shots that would make it onto the evening news or into the newspapers.

“Don’t let Marty see these,” she said.

“Of course. Poor kid.”

Rose looked at the pictures as they were displayed, spotting the Metropolitan Police stamp on the bottom right of each one. Crime scene photos. She wondered how many other crime scenes Lee had viewed like this over the years, and whether any of them had involved a dead man in a suit. She was so focused on the screen that, for a second, she didn’t notice Lee staring right at her.

“What?” she asked.

“Just… trying to come to terms with it.” For a moment it seemed that he was about to say more, but then his computer played the opening strains to Muse’s “Take a Bow.”

“Message,” he said. He opened the relevant email account and clicked on the new message. Rose tried to read it but he quickly closed it again.

“What was it?”

“Bad news.”

“What sort of bad news?” Francesco asked.

Lee swiveled in his chair to face both of them.

“Your father’s dead,” he said, looking at Rose. “That was from my old crime scene officer friend in the Met.”

“Where?” Rose asked. “How?” She felt nothing approaching pity, but there was sadness for Marty. She’d have to tell him, and she didn’t look forward to it.

Lee opened the email again, scanned it, then clicked on an embedded link. It led through to another slew of crime scene photographs. These looked somehow more rushed than those she’d just been viewing, less well framed, and she could see why. People who took these photographs must see a lot in the course of their jobs. But there was always something new.

They’d made sure that his face could be recognized. His head was fixed up there somehow, and the rest of him was spread across a swath of dark stone wall, guts hung like Chinese lanterns, blood and flesh still wet against the stone. It reflected London’s night lights. One of his eyes was closed as if winking, but the other was still wide open in death. Rose wondered what the last thing he’d seen had been, and knew it was nothing good.

“Where is this?” she asked.

“Plinth of Nelson’s Column, beside one of the lions.”

“When did it happen?” Francesco was standing at her shoulder now. He sounded interested rather than disgusted.

Lee reduced the photograph and read the email. “Found him half an hour ago. Can’t have been there much longer than that without being seen.”

“The vampires that did this must have been seen,” Rose said. “Trafalgar Square at night? It’s never empty, no matter what time.”

“They did it quickly,” Francesco said. “It would have taken seconds.”

“Well, they’re really doing their best to remain below the radar,” Lee commented.

“These are the vampires who want exposure, remember. They’re just getting ahead of themselves.”

“And sending us a message,” Rose said.

“What message?” Francesco asked, and Rose thought he was genuinely bemused.

“It’s a threat.”

“That’s a human,” he said, pointing at the screen even though the picture was gone. That was my father, Rose thought. What he must have gone through. Because she knew what these vampires might have done to him before finishing him somewhere public.

“So?” she replied. “To them, we’re Humains. They don’t understand us. They probably think of us as almost the same as humans, except they don’t feed from us.”

“Maybe,” Francesco said. He almost sounded hurt. “I suppose you should tell the boy. And, Lee… we really need the upper hand here. They find the Bane, and we’re finished.”

“No bad thing,” Lee said, and Francesco bent past Rose and grabbed the man’s neck in a flash. He pushed his face down into his keyboard, and the screen flickered with pages opening and closing, buzzing as too many keys were compressed.

“If we’re finished, that means they’ve just begun,” Francesco said. “And compared to them, we’re your best friends. Get it?”

“I got it,” Lee said through distorted lips. And he did. Rose knew that already. He understood as well as they did, and, treated right, would do his best to help. She touched Francesco’s shoulder and pulled lightly, easing him back.

“I’ve got Lee,” she said.

“No. Your brother.”

“I’ll let him sleep until morning.”

Francesco nodded, released Lee, and walked away. As he left the room Rose heard his low chuckle again, and she realized that he was enjoying this. Maybe existence had become too predictable, too routine for Francesco. She couldn’t condemn him for that; after all, he’d been undead for longer than she could imagine.

“So let’s keep searching,” Rose said. She pulled up a chair and sat beside Lee, not close enough to make him uncomfortable but close enough to see the screen.

He rubbed his mouth and the back of his head and worked the keyboard, closing windows he didn’t need and putting the computer back to where it had been before Francesco’s outburst.

“Okay, then,” he said. “While this search is running, tell me again what that vampire said about the Bane. Everything it said, how it said it, the words it used, the dialect…”

Rose cast her mind back to Francesco torturing the thing that had helped kill her mother. And she and Lee started working together.

Marty awoke, amazed that he’d been able to sleep. For a second he simply lay there, rising from the depths and gathering his life around him again. And in moments he realized that there wasn’t that much left of it. Events rolled in like rapid waves, building and building until he sat up on the bed and reentered his sad, shattered world. He groaned and held his head, wishing he could squeeze out some of the truth.

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked around. The room was in darkness, and the light showing at the window was cast from one of the tall streetlamps. It was still night. They’d still be here.

The bedroom had a small bathroom en-suite, and after pissing he ran a glass of water and drank quickly. He was hungry, even though hunger felt wrong now that Mum was gone. And what of his father? Was he hungry now? And if so, Marty wondered what form his hunger would take. Dad had always liked cheese toasties with lashings of Indian chutney—strong cheese, hot chutney—and he’d always claimed to have a preference for intense tastes. Was he hungering for something like that now? Or was he craving blood?

The fact that his father might have been turned did not upset Marty as much as it should. He ran hot water in the sink and watched the large mirror slowly steam up, waiting until the whole surface was obscured before running his hand across it. He saw himself clear as day, but wondered whether a vampire would. Was that just another stupid superstition? He guessed so. Rose seemed as real as death to him, so there was no reason she wouldn’t show in a mirror. These weren’t the fancy vampires from those old Hammer movies. They were flesh and…

Blood?

He supposed so. But he wondered whether Rose had rats’ blood in her veins or her own.

He washed quickly, then left the room. Out on the landing he stood for some time, listening for sounds of movement or activity in the house. The idea flashed across his mind that they’d all gone out hunting the vampires and left him locked in, and a stab of fear hit him. I don’t want to be alone! But then he heard a voice from somewhere nearby—subdued, almost whispered—and he knew that he was safe.

Marty remained standing there for some time, leaning on the banister while he listened. It was coming from Lee’s office, on the other side of the landing. The door was partly closed, but he saw the subtle rise and fall of lighting levels as Lee used his computer, clicking from screen to screen as he hunted across the net.

Marty was surprised they hadn’t killed Lee. After everything Rose had revealed about the Humains, he was still a terrible threat to them now. But there was also that Bane, and he guessed they needed the ex-SIS officer to help them find it.

“Jesus Christ,” someone said from Lee’s office. The voice was low, male, and he was pretty sure it was Lee. Then Rose responded, though Marty couldn’t quite hear what she said.

Intrigued, he started edging around the landing and past the staircase. Francesco might be somewhere near, but the tall vampire didn’t miraculously appear anywhere. Perhaps he was resting. Or feeding. Even big, posh houses like this probably had rats in their basements.

As he approached the office door, Marty could make out better what was being said inside.

“I’ve read about her,” Lee said. “Ashleigh Richards. Maybe a couple of years back, there was an article in one of the Sunday supplements. One of her students wrote it. She was a renowned archaeologist for a long time, then she just lost it. Went mad, became a bit of a hermit, rarely left her house. No one could place why it happened, and there was some talk of a curse. You know, like Tutankhamen?”

“That’s just a load of old superstitious crap.”

“This from a vampire.”

Marty smiled at that. Lee might be a bastard, but it sounded like he’d quickly regained his feet.

“You’re sure this is it, though?” Rose said.

“Look, all these words here—see?—have thrown up several hundred matches, none of which sound anything like what we’re looking for. They’re either a long way off or concern something or someone else. Or sometimes it’s the fault of the search engine, coming up with something like a book or a crossword clue or a movie reference. But when I added what you said that vampire said—‘bleeding Bane’—we get this.”

“Archaeologist,” Rose said. “Does seem convenient, doesn’t it?”

“Hang on,” Lee said. “Let’s see where Richards was working when…”

Computer keys were tapped. Marty edged closer to the half-open door, took a deep breath, and risked a look inside. He leaned in slowly, checking the extremes of the room before concentrating on the two people sitting at the computer desk. Rose and Lee had their backs to him, and there was no one else in the room. Francesco is somewhere, Marty thought, but he was too interested now, and however much he cautioned himself, he couldn’t pull away. With Rose here, he felt protected. Besides, they were Humains: they apparently liked humans too much to hurt him. He hoped.

“Last dig she worked on was on the site of a new school down in Wiltshire. Close to Stonehenge.” Lee pointed at the screen. “Look: there. They were excavating a burial chamber. The King of Stonehenge, they called him, and they took out all the stuff buried with him too.”

“And we can assume the Bane was down there with him?”

“Can’t assume anything,” Lee said. “That’s what research is for. Watch this.” He started tapping away again, and Rose leaned back in her chair. She looked at Lee as he worked—she was sitting almost at a right angle to him, causing Marty to ease back from the doorway a little—and then she smiled.

“Almost back to normal,” she said softly. Lee stopped typing as if he’d been frozen at his desk, one hand raised, ready to tap another key.

“It never was normal,” he said. “You’re a fucking vampire. Don’t for a second try and be nice with me, Rose. If that’s even your name.”

“It is.”

“Because you can’t be nice to me.” He started tapping again and Rose looked back at the screen. Taking some shit there, Sis, Marty thought, but perhaps her strength was in not responding.

“Here,” Lee said at last. The screen changed and he started reading. “The chamber is dated at around 2300 B.C. Early days of metalworking in Britain. They think a lot of the stuff buried with him was made in Europe.”

Marty could see Rose examining her hands, checking each fingernail one at a time, and he wondered what for. Blood?

“They called him the King because he was very tall for the time. They think… blah blah blah… loads of site reports. Hang on.” He scanned down the page. “Here. They think in all probability he was an archer from France or…”

“Or Spain,” Rose said. She sat up straight in her chair. “Spanish Bane.”

“Yeah.”

“So where does this madwoman live?”

“Two seconds.” Lee tapped away.

Marty pulled back from the door and leaned against the landing wall. He scanned the shadows for watchers but felt alone. So they really had dug up something that had those vampire freaks interested.

“Here it is,” Lee said. “Fifty-six Otter Street, down in Colliers Wood.”

“Right…” Rose trailed off for a moment. “Damn.”

“I can go,” Lee said.

“No way.”

And then Marty saw the reason for her hesitation. There was a wide window at the head of the landing, and the curtains there had lightened just a little. The streetlamps were still on, but this light was different. The new day dawned.

“Rose, can you waste another day?”

“They won’t be able to go, either, even if they have a clue where she lives.”

“But vampires have their servants. They always have. Human pricks who do their bidding, hoping they’ll be rewarded and turned when their job’s done.”

“You want to be our bitch, Lee?”

“Seems I am already.”

“No. Not a good idea. Come on, we need to tell Francesco.”

Fuck! Marty moved quickly, slipping along the landing and briefly considering crossing to his room. But as soon as Rose reached her door she’d see him, and if she knew he’d heard every word in there… he wasn’t sure what she’d do.

Maybe he could go instead of Lee.

But that was something he should speak to her about alone, not force on her.

Through a partly open door to his left he saw a bathroom, so he ducked inside and clicked the door closed. Moments later Rose’s voice increased in volume as she exited Lee’s office and walked onto the landing.

“Quietly. I don’t want Marty woken up yet.”

“You need to tell him—”

“He needs rest. You gassed him, remember?”

Marty heard two sets of footsteps passing the door and descending the staircase. He kept repeating the madwoman’s address to himself until it was imprinted on his mind, then opened the door.

Time to see just how much Rose still trusted him.