30 Days of Night: Fear of the Dark

10

“I CAN BRING IT down here,” Lee said. “The whole house is wireless. But I barely use half the rooms, so I just keep it in my office. Haven’t used it for a year or more.”

“You know it still works?”

“It’ll need plugging in,” he said, shrugging. “But no reason it shouldn’t.”

“No,” Francesco said.

“You’d rather just sit here and—”

“Yes.” And it looked like the tall vampire would be happy doing just that. Dawn was three hours ago now, and Lee had hardly seen him move a muscle. Francesco had had his eyes closed all that time, but never for a moment had Lee assumed he was asleep. He was starting to think they never slept.

“Fine. Let’s just sit here and waste a day, then.”

“It won’t be wasted,” Rose said. “Marty’s out there.”

“And who knows what’s happening to him? Let me get my laptop. I can scan police channels, try and keep a tab on what’s going on. I can even search for the Bane.”

“From down here?” Francesco asked. He opened his eyes at last.

“You forget who I used to work for. I have a name, an address, and an occupation. I can find out who she’s worked for, where she worked, what digs she took part in, where the stuff she dug up was cataloged and stored, what color underwear she was wearing at the time. I’m not saying it’s definite, but if there’s a trail of any sort, I’ll find it.”

“Maybe he’s right.” Rose was pacing the basement, slowly but consistently. Lee wondered what she was thinking. Speculating what it would be like chained up down here like a fucking animal, probably.

“You’ll run,” Francesco said. “No.” And he closed his eyes and sat back again, leaning against the damp basement wall.

“The vampires will be underground somewhere too,” Rose said.

“And the fucks they’ll have working for them?” Lee asked.

“Marty’s smart.”

“Has he ever killed anyone?” Rose glared at Lee, then looked away sharply. Ahh, Lee thought. Sore spot. He’d keep that in reserve for another time. But the smugness vanished quickly as he realized what that look meant: Rose had killed someone.

“Of course not,” she said.

“He might have to. Think what that could do to the boy.”

Rose didn’t reply, but went and squatted in front of Francesco so that Lee couldn’t see either of their faces. They conversed so quietly that he couldn’t hear; then, after a short silence, Rose stood and returned to him.

“If you make a run for it, we’ll find you. We’ll do things to you that even vampires haven’t dreamt of. You understand?”

“Yeah,” Lee said. She stood so close that he could feel the coolness coming off her. He found himself leaning forward. Then she turned and started up the basement staircase.

Lee followed. At the top he asked, “So, what did you say to him?”

“None of your fucking business.”

Lee squeezed past Rose and opened the door. She retreated several steps from the daylight. And for the next couple of minutes his life, and his destiny, would be his own.

She made him step inside.

All Marty wanted to do was run. He’d never had a gun pointed at him before. His mate Gaz claimed he had—said a bunch of gangbangers mugged him on his way home from a concert one night—but Marty had never been sure whether to believe him. There were guns in London, of course, but they were more prevalent in organized crime than street gangs. The gangs usually just dealt in blades.

It was a strange feeling, informed completely by his knowledge of movies and books. He’d spent months watching Vic Mackey on The Shield, wondering how many hours of training it had taken for the actor to hold his gun correctly. He’d stared down the end of Dirty Harry’s Magnum many times. But here he was, looking into the business end of an ugly, snub-nosed thing, held by a woman who was shaking so much her teeth clattered, and it was like nothing he had ever imagined. It was much worse.

“I said in!” she cried.

“Okay. Okay.” Marty started lifting his hands in the universal warding-off gesture, as if flesh and bone could stop a bullet.

“Keep your hands down. Three… three seconds. And then…” She waved the gun, and for a terrible second Marty thought it was going to go off.

He stepped through the front door. The smell hit him then, a stench of rot and neglect that made him gag.

“Keep walking,” Ashleigh Richards said. She slammed the door and the corridor grew darker.

“Where?”

“What?”

“Where do you want me to walk?”

The skin between his shoulder blades tickled as though caressed with hot metal. He tried breathing through his mouth, but that way he tasted the stench as well, a greasy film on his tongue that he could almost chew. His heart thumped, and because he was breathing harder and faster he smelled more. Something ran across the corridor ahead of him, down beside the narrow staircase; too small to be a cat, too large to be a mouse.

The woman said nothing. She’s trying to find the strength to pull the trigger, Marty thought, and he started turning around, wincing against the explosion of the gun and the bright pain that would follow. He’d often wondered about death, and pain, and how fast it would have to be to feel nothing. It was said that a decapitated head remained conscious for several seconds afterward, and there must be pain there, surely? Get shot in the heart and death is almost instantaneous, but the body must realize what has happened. The time delay between sending an impulse and your finger moving was so small as to be unnoticeable, so pain flowing the other way must be the same.

When she shot him, he’d have time to scream before he died.

But the woman was no longer pointing the gun at him. She’d lost it somewhere—dropped it into the pile of unopened mail, perhaps, or slipped it back into her jacket pocket—and she was rubbing at her left hand again. She’d retrieved the stained towel to do so.

“There are faces out in the streets,” she said. “Watching from the shadows. They’ve been watching for a long time.”

Faces? “How long?”

“Years.” She frowned and stopped wiping. “Who are you? What are you doing in my house?” He saw how lost she was then. He’d never met an insane person—at least, no one who wore their madness on the outside—and he felt an instant rush of pity. He’d gone through phases of worry about both his parents: they’d get cancer, they’d be mugged and killed, they’d get Alzheimer’s. Their premature deaths meant that none of these possible fates would come to fruition, but the idea of Alzheimer’s had been worst.

“You told me to come in,” he said. “You pointed a gun at me.”

“Gun,” she said. “I thought… thought you were one of the faces.”

“No, I’m Marty.” Against his better judgment he held out his hand. Ashleigh stopped rubbing again and grinned at him.

“Oh, no. No, I can’t possibly give you the gun.”

“No, I…” Marty half smiled, not sure if she was messing with him. But it seemed not. She squeezed past him, never once taking her eyes off him, and backed past the staircase into the kitchen.

“Well, come on, then!” she said. “I’ll make tea. Tea?”

“Please.” This is fucking insane! He followed her through the house, and it was only then that he noticed some of the things around him. The place was stinking and cluttered, but hidden behind this was a treasure trove of archaeological items, paintings, and old weapons. A display unit narrowed the corridor, and it was loaded with a dozen reconstructed clay objects. Some were pots or jugs, others sculptures of some sort, and a couple he couldn’t quite identify. Beside the display case stood a few spears which, though dusty, seemed so complete and neat-looking that he thought they weren’t old at all. There for protection? he wondered.

It was the most unusual kitchen he’d ever seen. There was a cooker, a table, and a chair, but all the other units were filled with more items from Ashleigh’s past. They were stacked and shelved neatly, many were tagged, but there was a thick layer of dust over everything which must have made them feel at home.

“Milk?” she asked, shaking a carton that stood beside the cooker. It did not sound fluid.

“Black, please.”

“So what did you say your name was?”

“Marty. I’m not here to hurt you.”

“You’re real, then?” she asked without turning around, and with no sense that it was at all an unusual question.

“Completely,” he said. “Flesh and blood.” She paused at his mention of blood, then stirred his tea. Does she know about the vampires? He would have to tread carefully.

“I’m afraid there are no biscuits.” She placed his cup on the small table, spilling a slick of weak-looking tea. She didn’t seem to notice. Her fingernails were black, her arms streaked with dirt, and she smelled like some of the beggars he sometimes saw on the streets. There had been an old guy who used to sit outside their local shop, just away from the pavement along a narrow alley. The kids used to make fun of him because he rarely moved, and a slick of piss had run downhill and stained the pavement. He’d soon been moved on, but Marty had never forgotten that smell. It was the stench of hopelessness, and giving in. Ashleigh did not smell quite that bad—the piss stink came from elsewhere in the house, he thought—but her eyes held the same look of defeat.

“I’m not hungry,” he said. “Mrs. Richards—”

“Ash. I am always Ash. Was always Ash.”

“Ash… I came to ask you about something. Something you dug up once.”

Ash laughed, and it was a delightful sound. For a woman living in such fear, it showed she still had some sort of a life, deep inside.

“I’ve dug up a lot of things. Some of them are around you, here! Some are in other places. A few were worth something, and they’re on display in museums. They were… of interest. Used to be of interest to me, but I’ve had enough of old things. Times gone by. There’s nothing to be learnt from it.” She glanced away and started rubbing at her hand again.

“It’s an amazing house,” Marty said. He took a sip of tea because he thought he should. It was bland and insipid, but at least it didn’t seem like it would kill him.

“Maybe,” she said.

“I wonder if—” Marty began, but then Ash started talking as if he weren’t there. Perhaps she spoke like this when she was alone, and now it was her only way to communicate. He wasn’t sure. But by the time she’d finished, he had an idea of how he could get what he wanted.

“There’s a darkness to the past,” she said. “Shadows cast by time. We enter the shadows, but can’t cast a light there. We don’t know how. Too ignorant. Wrapped up with celebrity gossip and television shows about… maintaining your house. We’ve lost touch with the darkness. Time turns out the lights, and we feel around in history’s night and try and understand it by touch alone. We’ve lost all other abilities to understand. We dig up a sculpture made four thousand years ago—”

Four thousand years!

“—and use supposed expert knowledge to see what it was for. Fertility object, seasonal watch, battery, charm, present to the gods, likeness of one particular god… we don’t really know. How can we? The past is as remote to us as the future, apart from the shards left behind to confuse us even more. At least the future… at least…” She rubbed at her hand more vigorously. “I’m lost in the past. Floating there in the dark. I never thought I would be, never thought all that contact would have such an effect. I’m educated, you see. Learned. I knew what I was doing. But then that thing… that bleeding thing, the bane of my life…”

Can she really mean the Bane? Marty wondered, and the possibility scared him. If she was talking about the Bane, then the chance that it truly held such power was much increased. From what he’d heard, it was little more than some vampire superstition. But now he was talking with someone who might have touched it. And it had driven her mad.

“I’m here to help,” he said. “I’m here to take it away and destroy it.”

She looked at him with dawning realization, as if she’d only just noticed that he was there.

“It can’t be destroyed.”

“Then I’ll make it a shard again. Give it back to the past, so that it’s no longer here to…” He nodded at her hand. “Hurt you. Whatever.”

Ash looked at her hand and started rubbing again, though more gently than before.

“You’re not one of the faces?”

“No,” he said, though he wasn’t sure exactly who she meant. Maybe it was best not to know. “I’m not one of the faces. Not them.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” And she dropped the towel and sat at the small table.

“Will you tell me about it?” he asked.

“No!” The shout was sudden, its volume shocking. “I can’t tell anyone. It’s not part of me anymore.” And then, as if to contradict all she had said, she started to cry, her head lowering more with each wrenching sob until her forehead was resting on her hands.

Marty wanted to help. But he thought if he touched her, he might startle her out of whatever state she was in now, frighten her protective wall into being once again. So he left her bereft, and listened.

“I found it when no one should have. I touched it, and no one was meant to. I sent it away… not far enough, but away. And now I can’t even begin to find it again. Not me. Not like this.”

For the first time, Marty felt a chill at the idea of the Bane rather than a childlike excitement. That excitement had been nervous, true, but nervous like a kid sneaking downstairs after lights-out to watch a horror movie on TV. A thrill. Now he was genuinely scared.

“Tell me where it is,” he said, and Ash looked up at him, inspiring a shattering few seconds of déjà vu.

Tell me where it is, his mother says, looking at him with tears in her eyes, because he’s taken something of hers and now he can’t remember what he did with it. It was only some old postcard with a scrawl on the back that he couldn’t read, and a black-and-white picture on the front of people sitting at the seaside in long coats and jacket. Maybe he’d taken it into their small garden… perhaps he’d torn it up to make pellets for his elastic-band wars with his friend Gaz… but he couldn’t remember right then, and her tears drove any shred of memory deeper.

“If I tell you where it is, will it go away?”

“Yes,” Marty said. “I’ll make it.”

“But…” She started rubbing her hand again, but she’d dropped the towel and now she was just scraping her nails across her skin.

“I promise,” he said.

“Well.” And she smiled. Light seemed to fill her face, and it was obvious there had been none there for some time. Though she was his roughly his mother’s age, Ash reminded him of her now for the first time, and Marty had to bite back tears.

She beckoned him forward. He went and leant on the table, lowering his head so that her mouth was close to his ear. And she told him.

After that, going home was such a stupid thing to do.

Ash saw him to the door, and by the time she’d bid him farewell, Marty was starting to think the gun had been all in his imagination. She wasn’t a different woman exactly, but a shadow about her had lifted, as if sun had shone on her skin for the first time in years. She still opened the door cautiously and peered out like a mouse watching for a cat—The faces are still there, she said, I don’t think they’ll ever leave me alone—but as Marty passed her and stepped into the tiny front yard, she thanked him.

Leaving, he heard the door shut again behind him, and the lock clicked as she incarcerated herself once more.

Knowing what he knew, he should have returned to Lee Woodham’s house straightaway. Coming here to Otter Street, he’d been terrified of the vampires and what they had done. But leaving, he was now also scared of everything that surrounded them. Before, they had been brutal, merciless killers, and he’d have done anything he could to hold one down and give it pain before bestowing true death. But after seeing Ashleigh Richards and the effect the Bane had had upon her, he understood that there was a whole world behind these creatures. It was a world that until recently he’d have regarded as make-believe and fanciful, but now he knew it was true. They were the undead, and there was a magic to their background.

But he did not immediately retrace his steps. Something about the London light seemed different, as if everything he saw had been smeared with a light sheen of blood; a redness overlay everything, and he rubbed his eyes many times to try and clear them. He wondered whether he had caught something from Ashleigh, some madness that had taken her years before at that dig in Wiltshire.

Perhaps it was anger, or rage, or grief finally fighting its way through the walls he had erected around it, seeking release and blinding him against the obvious, terrible reality.

So he decided to see what was left of the place he had once called home. He knew that the Humains had set a fire there after the attack, trying to destroy evidence that might make authorities ask awkward questions. But ruin though it must be, perhaps it was somewhere he could regain some sense of balance and composure.

It was a quick fifteen-minute trip on the tube, but he decided to walk. The thought of going back belowground—where the sun never shone, and where shadows were kept at bay only by the persistent artificial lighting—was suddenly more terrifying than ever.

It took him almost an hour, following streets, alleys, and routes both known and unfamiliar. He searched inside himself to try and find a sense of going home, but it was curiously absent. When he finally arrived at the street, it was familiar enough, but only as somewhere he had visited many times in the past, not somewhere he had felt at home. He walked toward the remains of the house, and even from a distance, he saw the police tape marking out the small front garden and extending across the pavement. There was a police car parked a couple of houses away, and he saw the shape of someone sitting inside, cigarette smoke curling from the open window.

Marty crossed the street and sat on a garden wall. His family home was fifteen houses along on the opposite side, and from this angle he could see some of what was left. It wasn’t much. The façade still stood, but the windows on both floors had been blown out and the London brickwork scorched black with soot. The roof had half collapsed, and many slates had exploded from the heat. The houses on either side seemed to have escaped excessive damage, though they both had boarding over a couple of their windows, and he couldn’t see from here what had happened in their roof space.

The ruin was calm. Yesterday the police and crime-scene officers must have been picking over the debris, but they seemed to have found everything they were looking for.

Mum’s remains in there, he thought. Blackened parts of her. There was no way the police could have swept up—scooped up—everything of her he had seen in the hallway. The fire would have cooked and charred that, and the ash was still a part of their old home.

He looked down at his feet and took several deep breaths. And that was how he saw, across the road in front of him, the shadow of someone watching. His heart stuttered, winding him. The shadow of the terrace behind him drew a fine line along the road: rooftop, interrupted at regular intervals by chimneys. And between two chimney stacks, a mound that could only be a head.

Daylight, it’s daylight, they only come out at night. But they had their fucking slaves. And he realized then what a fool he’d been to come here. Home, however little was left of it, would be one of the first places they’d be looking for him.

Trying not to give any indication that he’d seen, Marty looked along the street again, eyes turned sideways and concentrating on the shadow. Before long it moved, only slightly but enough for him to confirm what it was. Not a bird, not a cat… a head.

He pushed away from the wall and walked along the street a little, pausing again when a tree blocked his line of sight to the police car. He could still see the remains of the house. It didn’t feel as familiar as it should. His bedroom was on the right on the second floor, and he could see from here that the ceiling had fallen in, roof timbers fractured and charred. All his stuff was in there—CDs, books, clothes, photographs, evidence of his life—and now it was forever beyond his reach. But he found that he didn’t care. It was just stuff.

Marty glanced back along the road, to where the rooftop shadow almost cut the road in half lengthwise. The head shadow had vanished.

Time to leave, he thought, turning his back on the remains of his home for the last time. I should have gone straight back to Lee’s. I know where the Bane is now, and walking the streets like this is just—

There was someone at the far end of the street, leaning against the wall of a house that Marty himself had walked past just five minutes before. It was a man, he could tell that much, but he was in shadow, his features uncertain. Jeans, maybe. Jacket of some sort. Short hair. He seemed to be looking at his hands, picking his nails or examining something he was holding.

He glanced up and stared straight at Marty, exposing the blade in his hand.

“Fuck,” Marty muttered. He walked directly across the street and stood beneath a tree, glancing back at the police car. No movement there, just the drift of cigarette smoke. Then he looked up at the rooftops, shielding his eyes from the sunlight and scanning for whatever had caused the shadow. Nothing.

The man along the street had started toward him.

Marty started walking, heading directly for the cordoned-off section of pavement outside his gutted home. And it was only then, fear speeding his blood, that the familiarity of that place became almost overwhelming. He remembered walking along here holding his mother’s hand when he was maybe six years old, head dipped against a powerful hailstorm. Skateboarding along the pavement with Gaz when he was eleven, using the paving slab pushed up by a tree root as a small ramp. Kicking a football alone, apologizing to a little old lady as it ricocheted off her shopping buggy. And walking along with Rose, her shouting, Gimme ten! and Marty closing his eyes for ten seconds as she went to hide, and that memory did not end because he could no longer recall where she had hidden. He’d been happy, she’d been laughing, and he never believed back then that such a memory could be overlaid with darkness.

He realized that the reddish sheen that had coated his vision since leaving the archaeologist’s house had vanished.

“Hey!” a voice said. It wasn’t too loud, but he knew instantly it was directed at him.

He glanced back, but the man over the street was walking with his head down. If he’d been the one to call, he gave no sign. His right arm swung naturally, his left hand remained down by his side, fingers curled up where they clasped the knife handle.

I can’t believe this, Marty thought, and then he uttered a half-mad chuckle. After everything he’d seen and come to learn, a scumbag mugger stalking him along his own street wasn’t too far out.

Except this was no mugger. He knew that, just as he knew the shadow he’d seen on the rooftop didn’t belong to someone adjusting a chimney or fixing a TV aerial. These were men working directly for the vampires, lowlifes who’d been promised something that put whatever they were asked to do in the shade—money, drugs, women… immortality. And, for them, Marty would surely be a fine prize.

“Hey, dickhead!” the voice came again, and Marty was still looking at the man across the street. He was sure the voice hadn’t come from him, though the guy’s lips did seem to break into a smile.

Marty slowed, only three houses away from his taped-off home now. There was a white van between him and the police car, and farther along the street, he could now see the tall woman. She’d emerged from behind a tree and was staring directly at him. He’d have laughed if his situation hadn’t suddenly become so dire: she was dressed just as she should have been for the movies, with black leather trousers, black T-shirt stretched tight over big tits, and hair tied in a ponytail that hung over her left shoulder. She carried a jacket slung over her right shoulder—leather, black—and she was smiling. It was the smile more than anything that prevented his laughter. It was totally without humanity.

“Yeah,” she said, “talking to you, fuckface.”

Where are the cops?

Marty stepped past the parked van, close enough to his house now to smell the stench of wet ash and charred wood. He tried not to look. There was nothing left to see, he shouldn’t have come here, he was a fucking fool, but still he found it hard not to stare at what had become of his old life. A ruin. A memory. Stained with badness, nothing would be the same again.

“What are you meant to be?” he asked the woman. He glanced to the right. The police car was there, the window on this side closed. He could see the cops now, chatting and laughing. They hadn’t even noticed anything was going on.

Several cars passed along the street, their engines masking the woman’s voice. She was standing just the other side of the closed-off stretch of pavement, twenty feet from him.

“I’m someone you’ll be sorry you met, shithead.” He could see the longing in her eyes now, and he’d seen that look before a hundred times in a hundred pubs and clubs: junkie.

He looked her up and down. “You look like my last wet dream.”

The woman brought a hand up to her right breast and squeezed.

“Wank away,” she said. “But after Duval’s finished with you, you won’t have it in you anymore. Where the hell’ve you been, anyway? Got the boss pissed off.”

Duval, Marty thought, and then he sensed someone closing on him from behind. He spun around, and the man from across the street was standing with the white van between him and the police car, brandishing the knife.

“Somewhere safe,” he said. “Finding stuff out, unlike you.”

The leather-clad woman froze, glancing around the street. “Stuff… ? The Bane… ? You know where… ?”

Marty shook his head. What have I said? He wanted to back away but they had him surrounded. Stupid idiot, what have I said? “No, not that, just… stuff.” But his panic and fluster gave him away.

“You’ll come nice and quiet,” she said, excited now. “Don’t want to upset the neighbors, and—”

“The cops. I’ll call them.” His heart sank. Marty felt sick. What a fucking idiot!

“Do that and my friend Stoner—you saw him, didn’t you, up on the roof?—well, you call to the pigs and he’ll gut them. Both of them. The woman he might take his time over.”

Marty found it in himself to laugh. He was terrified, and mad at himself, but they were almost ridiculous.

“What the fucking hell do you think you are?” he asked, and as they both came for him he made the only decision he could. There was no way he could fight these bastards. They’d beat him, cut him, take him to their fucking leader. But he could get away from them.

“Vampires!” he screamed at the top of his voice. “There are vampires trying to kill me!” He darted into the road in front of the white van and ran directly toward the police car. He caught the look of shock and confusion on the woman’s face as she stepped out of sight behind a tree, and then from behind the police car came one of the biggest men he’d ever seen. Almost seven feet tall and almost as wide, this had to be Stoner, and for a second Marty thought he might just have signed the cops’ death warrant.

But these were scumbags, not professional criminals, probably more used to mugging pensioners for their weekly payouts so they could score their next hit than taking on a cop.

Stoner’s shock and confusion was apparent, and Marty pointed at him and screamed, “There! Vampire! He’s going to kill you, look out, he’s got a knife, there, there!” The smoking cop was already half out of the car and on the pavement, and he glanced behind him as Marty pointed.

Stoner turned and ran.

As Marty reached the police car, the driver’s door was opening and the second cop was climbing out. It was a woman, dark hair tied up in a bun, and Marty made another snap decision. They’d try to calm him down, send him on his way, unless he did something…

He ran to the front of the car and kicked in one of the headlights.

“Hey!” the woman cop shouted.

Marty danced to the right and kicked in the other headlight, then started booting the car’s grille.

“Leave it!” the smoking policeman shouted. He threw his cigarette aside, pulled his pepper spray and Marty backed off, hands up, submissive.

“Little shit,” the woman said, checking out the damage.

“Vampires!” Marty shouted. But looking around, checking both ways along the street, he saw that the three scumbags had already vanished.

He went to his knees and sat calmly. His heart was thundering, and he wondered what he had just avoided. And that was how, for the first time in his life, Marty Volk was arrested.