30 Days of Night: Fear of the Dark

3

MARTY STAYED IN HIS bedroom until his father called him down for breakfast. It was Saturday. His parents usually went uptown on Saturdays, going through the motions of shopping and browsing and having lunch and enjoying themselves, even though a part of them would always be missing. Sometimes Marty went with them, but he went less and less nowadays, now that he was almost an adult and had a life slowly building itself around him. If he didn’t go he’d spend time with Gaz, jamming with their guitars in his friend’s bedroom or wandering the neighborhood with their other mates. Smoking, drinking, laughing. Sometimes the future reminded them of the frightening weight of its potential, but usually at that age they lived for the moment. Some Saturdays he’d have mates around to his house for the evening, and his mum and dad would go upstairs to read or watch TV while Marty and his gang watched horror movies in the living room. They had a thirty-six-inch TV, great for expanding scares. Marty’s favorite had always been The Thing. Gaz liked Underworld.

“Marty? It’s almost eleven. You up?”

“Yeah, Dad.” He’d been up all night. He was standing in front of his mirror, staring into his own tired eyes and wondering just what the hell he could say.

“Fried egg on toast? Me and your mum are going into town later; you want to come with us?”

“Dunno!” He heard his own voice, saw his mouth move, but felt distant from the day and the boy he was looking at in the mirror. He had a pretty decent mustache and beard for a seventeen-year-old. He looked terrified of his own image.

“I’ll get breakfast going,” his father called uncertainly. Marty heard his parents in the kitchen below him, the rumble of their unheard words tinged with concern.

He took in a deep breath, taking in the day. It did nothing to disperse the events of the night before, and when he looked at his hands, he was glad. They were dirty from sprawling on the pavement. Under two fingernails of his left hand was black stuff, and he wondered if it was vampire blood. He wondered if vampires even bled—whether they had blood at all—and what would happen if he scraped it out and watered it down and drank it. Not that he wanted to. It was going right down the sink, down into the rat-infested darkness where it belonged. But still he wondered.

While he was washing and cleaning his teeth, he thought about what he was going to say. As he dressed and sprayed deodorant, trying to clear away the stink of fear that had hung around him ever since he’d seen his undead sister the night before, he formed the words in his mind.

And, sitting down over breakfast, realizing how foolish every one of them sounded, he let them out.

He should have expected such a reaction, he supposed. His mother had left the house in tears, and he’d never seen his dad so mad. Even though he thought they must have seen how serious he was—how he believed every word he was telling them—there had not been a single moment when they had seemed ready to entertain the truth. The incredulity was obvious in their eyes as he told them about the thing stalking and attacking him. He made sure from the beginning that it did not for a second sound like a normal man, and his mother said, “Really, Marty.” His father just scoffed and went on eating his breakfast.

Then Marty told them how Rose had rescued him and they both lost their tempers. True to form, his mother’s anger quickly gave way to silent tears, and his dad ranted for a few moments before falling silent, fuming. Marty tried to convince them, telling them they had to get out of London that night in case the thing came back, but he’d already lost them.

Alone in the house, he wondered whether adulthood made everyone so blind to the incredible. His own belief in the things he had seen had been instantaneous: he trusted his eyes too much, perhaps, but he was more than willing to believe the obvious. He tried convincing himself again that it had been a dream, brought on by some sort of delayed grief at the loss of his sister. He spent some time sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, staring into the small back garden at the birds hopping from the nut and seed feeders his parents liked hanging there, waiting for his memories to take flight. They’d disperse and reveal themselves to be lies, exposing the most inexplicable parts of themselves that could not possibly be true. But now matter how hard he concentrated, now matter how hard he remembered, the memories retained the weight of reality.

“I did see Rose,” he said to the silent room. And then he took his tea back up to his bedroom and opened his laptop.

A simple Google search for ”vampires” brought him sixteen million results. He messed around with various word combinations, not really sure what he was looking for. Pretty soon he came to realize just how much crap there was on the net about such things, and he endeavored to filter out as much of the cinematic and literary content as he could. Discovering some more serious content about vampires was not easy, and once he did, most of it seemed to have been written by mad people. There were vampire clubs he could join in Denmark and Belgium, places where he could go to clubs and drink someone else’s blood to a death metal sound track. There was a vampire family in New Zealand who invited people to their community to be ”initiated.” Message boards, forums, and blogs told the real life stories of vampires, some even going so far as to feature, from what Marty could tell, real murders in their tales. A researcher in France had written a reference book about Hitler’s vampire storm troopers. Nearly ten years ago, a woman in the States had also written one, labeled as fiction but which she went to great lengths to portray as fact, about how vampires had been responsible for an oil pipeline disaster in Alaska. Since then, there had been a slew of sightings and reports, behind which Marty perceived the skeleton of a conspiracy. The word was mentioned many times, and many of the links he clicked on appeared to have been taken down. Several links pointing to “genuine footage of a vampire attack” went to YouTube, but the familiar This video has been removed message always came up.

Marty sat back and sighed. There was so much that he didn’t have a clue what to treat as real or not. And even if he did find something real… what good could it do him?

He looked at his bedroom window and imagined it framing the night once more, and those old stories about a vampire being unable to enter a house without an invitation seemed so foolish. He imagined the glass and frame shattering and bursting inward, that creature leaping through, all claws and teeth and wild hair. But Rose had told him he’d be safe in the daytime, so some of the legends must be true at least. Should he wear a garlic necklace? Arm himself with wooden stakes? Build a fucking stream around the house?

He almost threw his laptop at the wall. He stood instead, closing the computer gently and pacing the room. Maybe Gaz would have some ideas. But he couldn’t imagine facing his friend and saying what he’d said to his parents. With them the disbelief had led to anger; with Gaz it would be mockery. And however serious his situation, Marty didn’t want to be mocked by his friends.

Taking a piss, he realized he had a choice to make. And by the time he finished he’d made it, because there was really no choice at all. There was no way he’d just run away and abandon his parents. And if he knew Rose half as well as he hoped, he knew that she would return tonight. He didn’t have to use the word “angel” to make her his guardian.

With his mind settled, Marty lay down on his bed and fell into a deep, dream-filled sleep.

They’d obviously been talking about him all day. Marty hated the idea that he had caused his parents such concern. Since Rose’s disappearance and supposed death he’d seen them both age greatly, as if grief could remove them from time. His mother’s personality had withered, her humor diluted and reduced to an occasional wan smile where joy had once lit her face. His father’s hair had grayed, but so had his outlook, bled of color and shriveled to the stark black and white of life lived by the numbers. He woke, he ate, he worked, he slept. Marty couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen either of them truly enjoying themselves. And now that Rose had come back, that only made things worse.

“Had a nice day, son?” his mother asked. “We had a good time in town.”

“Okay, Marty?” his dad asked.

Marty nodded and responded as he thought he should, and while Rose was pressing at his mind—and that monster vampire seemed to be squeezing his eyes from memory—he did not mention them again. He knew already that his parents would never listen or believe without proof, and there was little he could do to change that. What he could do was prepare… and he had been doing so all that afternoon.

He only hoped they didn’t notice before night fell.

As his parents bustled in the kitchen, preparing a salad for tea and brewing some coffee, Marty slumped down in front of the TV. The picture danced and some Z-list celebrities embarrassed themselves for his amusement, but his mind was far away, his attention focused on the things he had done around the house. They’ll see, they’ll notice, he kept thinking. But he could hear his parents’ murmurings from the kitchen—an extension of the conversation they’d been having all day, he had no doubt—and the closer dusk drew, the more he thought he’d got away with things.

He’d made a list of what he thought he knew about vampires. Then he’d thought about that thing last night, and Rose, and crossed off the more fanciful notions. That had been a creature eager for the heat and tang of his blood, but that didn’t mean it was a monster from fiction. A crucifix would not stop a man-eating lion from biting out his throat, and a bulb of garlic would not prevent a rabid dog from tearing at his flesh. Wooden stakes, on the other hand, would pierce any flesh and cause pain. Holy water he didn’t have a clue about, but battery acid would blind anything. Around the house, hidden from sight but easily accessible to anyone who knew where they were, he’d hidden several caches of each. He’d even dug out his old catapult from the attic, spending time in the garden collecting some of the harsher, sharper stones from the graveled pathways. It was beneath the sofa right now, the stones in his pockets.

His heart had not stopped galloping all afternoon. I should call the police I should tell the law I should call the army the church Gaz… But each time he considered calling and telling someone about his fears for the coming night, he could hear their response. So he didn’t call anyone at all.

He waited for Rose. Dusk came, darkness fell. His parents joined him in the sitting room, their eyes taking on a blank watery glare as TV gave them false escape. He was glad they didn’t quiz him about what he’d said that morning, and he glanced at them surreptitiously now and then, checking to see whether they’d believed even an ounce of his story. But no: their eyes focused on the bright world beyond the TV screen, far away from their own and safe beneath the veil of shallow fantasy. Not once did he see them looking at the window or turning their heads toward the front door. They didn’t even look at him.

Around nine p.m. he stood, sneaked the catapult from beneath his armchair cushion, and walked from the room.

“Gonna go upstairs and listen to some music,” he said.

“Oh, okay, son,” his mum replied, as if surprised that he’d been with them that evening. “Not going out tonight?”

“Nah, bit tired. Got a good book to read.”

“Don’t scare yourself awake.” It was something she’d said to him from a young age, when he’d started reading horror comics and James Herbert novels, and for a moment he felt a lump in his throat. She’d said it without even turning away from the TV screen.

“Love you,” he said quietly. Perhaps neither of them heard above the TV. Or maybe they’d forgotten how to answer him back.

Climbing the stairs, he checked behind the landing curtain where he’d put the small glass bottles filled with car battery acid. They were still there. In the landing cupboard were the three cricket stumps he’d sharpened up. He slipped into Rose’s room and felt under her bed, and for a brief, horrible moment he expected a hand to close around his own. But then he found the hockey stick that she had last touched when she was truly alive, and he felt the cool kiss of the razor blades he’d taped to its curved head.

If that thing doesn’t come back tonight, I’ve got a lot of clearing up to do tomorrow, he thought. But tomorrow felt impossibly distant, like an eagerly anticipated holiday six months in the future. He craved the sunrise but knew with a sudden certainty that between then and now would lie a deeper darkness.

When he opened his bedroom door, Rose was sitting on his bed. She smiled. His window was wide open, curtains billowing in a breeze, and as he quietly closed the door behind him, the darkness beyond the window growled.

It was the first time she’d been in her old home in five years. Everything was different: the smells, the sounds, the way the walls joined and the floors flexed beneath her. Approaching the house that evening, slinking through shadows and listening and watching for the vampire, she hadn’t expected to feel any nostalgia or sense of loss at all. And she hadn’t been wrong. But the sight of the house had stirred something deep inside that she’d been trying to analyze ever since.

My old room is just next door, she thought as she sat waiting on Marty’s bed. She had no wish to visit. She suspected it might be exactly the same as when she’d last seen it, that evening when she’d showered and dressed and made herself up with subtle, gentle makeup. The best makeup shouldn’t even be noticed, her dad had told her once, and she’d never been one for plastering her face and hiding beneath a new mask every evening. She’d been proud of herself and confident of her looks. And Francesco had been so charming.

Her parents were the sort who would have kept it the same. Shut the door, entering only to clean every now and then, or sit and brood. It wouldn’t be a shrine—they were sensitive but not foolish—but she could also imagine them maintaining some form of hope. Shrunken now, of course, fading with time. But clearing her room would have seemed like the ultimate betrayal.

It would be a stranger’s room. Nothing in there belonged to her anymore, whereas Marty’s room still contained something that had accompanied her across the strange threshold she had stepped over: the memory of her brother, and the desire to watch over him.

She sat there for an hour, knowing that he would come soon. She heard the sound of the TV downstairs and wondered what it would be reporting this time tomorrow. Nothing, she thought. There’ll be nothing, because we’re never seen and never known. And that’s the way it must always be.

At last the door opened and Marty entered, and she smiled grimly because she knew what was to come. Just a few minutes before, she had heard the first scratchings outside, the animal snuffling, and the soft wet rumble of the vampire’s breath as it waited.

“Rose?” Marty said, his eyes flickering from her to the window.

This is going to hurt, she thought, standing to offer herself as a larger target.

“Look out!” Marty shouted. He brought up his left arm, his right hand delving into his jeans pocket. Rose held up one hand, palm out, to prevent him doing whatever he was about to do, but he was quicker than she expected. She heard a leathery twang and then a wet thud from behind her. The attacking vampire screeched.

Rose leapt forward and gathered Marty to her, knocking the slingshot from his hand even as she felt the weight of the thing behind her.

“Rose?” her brother gasped, and then the pain bit in. The thing clasped her hips and pulled, his long claws sinking into her flesh and scraping bone. His strength was immense; she felt the meat in that part of her body stretching and parting, and a red haze of agony blinded her as he snatched her back toward the window. Wasn’t meant to be quite like this, she had time to think, letting Marty go and turning, stretching back with her left hand and closing her fist around a wad of greasy hair. She tugged, not to hurt but to give her more leverage to turn around, and as the vampire backed heavily into the wall beside the window, she found herself face-to-face with him. His right eye was swollen and leaking from the stone Marty had fired, and Rose felt a momentary flash of respect for her little brother.

But he had no idea what he was dealing with.

The vampire hissed and gripped harder, twisting his hands and pulling out two handfuls of flesh and cloth from the tops of her hips. Rose screamed—it came out as a screech, spittle- and blood-flecked, as her teeth chomped at the air.

The vampire laughed and pushed her away, tripping her as she went, and was falling on her even as she sprawled to the carpet. The plan was solid in her mind, but instinct would not let her lie back and submit. So she fought. Hands clawing, she lashed at the slavering thing, going for the wounded eye in the hope that she could temporarily blind him. He kneed her between the legs and slashed across her throat, parting skin, eyes widening at the splash of blood.

He’ll smell the difference, she thought. But then, the vampire must have known that already.

Marty was shouting. Something splashed across Rose’s raised arm and the vampire above her winced, then started screaming again. He reared up and wiped at his face, clawing deep runnels in his own forehead and cheeks as he wiped away whatever Marty had thrown.

Rose’s arm burned, but she ignored the pain, managing to free one leg and kick up with her heel. It cracked into the vampire’s chin and sent him back against the wall. Plaster cracked and powdered, timber split, and then she heard two voices she had not heard for a very long time: Marty’s parents shouting up at him, concern and fear behind their voices.

“Run!” Marty shouted, but he had his back against the bedroom door. In one hand he clasped a sharpened stick of some kind, his eyes wide and determined, and Rose thought, Oh, Marty, what have you been reading?

This was quickly getting out of hand. She stood, made sure she had the vampire’s attention… and then let him fool her with a feint to the left and a punch to the right. He beat her back down, and all the while as he pummeled her she had one eye on Marty, trying to communicate what she had planned.

He came at them, raising the cricket stump. The vampire punched out and caught Marty across the chest, sending him back over his bed. He fell on the other side and Rose thought that he might be safe, that he might be all right, if only he would stay down. Let him be winded, she thought. Let him stay down for a few more seconds.

The vampire paused in his attack. Rose groaned, feigning semiconsciousness. And he started to talk.

Francesco had said this would happen. That most vampires were proud, arrogant and superior. It was what their plan had pivoted upon, and when she had objected to being bait for the monster, Francesco had calmed her with a smile and looked at the other Humains gathered there. We are better than them, he had said. But our superiority is based on truth.

“Foolish fucking bitch!” the thing spat. “I can hardly believe you came back for more.”

“She kicked your stinking ass last time,” Marty said. He’d hauled himself up on the bed, face white, blood speckling his chin.

“You shut up!” the vampire said. “I’ll rip you open soon enough.” He looked back down at Rose and grinned. His mouth was huge, the teeth too numerous, the eyes shrinking into blackened pits, and there was very little humanity left about him. That’s what the suit saw in me, she thought.

There was a sound from downstairs, a muffled scream followed by a thud. The vampire’s attention flickered for a moment… then his grin grew wider, and Rose knew that there were others. They’d expected that, and planned for it. With seven Humains, they could handle anything.

“You’ll find my blood tainted with rat and dog,” she said. His disgust was immediate and extreme. He drew back and looked at the wounds he’d inflicted on her, then down at his hands that had made them.

“How can you… ?” he asked.

“How can you?”

He reared up again, pride taking over once more, and stood with one foot pressing on her stomach more heavily than his mere weight should allow. Rose could wriggle, but little more.

“Filthy fucking dog,” he said. It was muttered, not shouted, and she heard the complete disgust and disdain in his voice. For a moment she wanted to say, But I have killed, I have drunk warm. But that was pandering to his monstrosity.

The door burst open. The vampire looked up, and she felt the pressure of his foot increasing horribly as he prepared to crush down and break her spine. It would not kill her—she’d helped nurse Rain back to health once after she’d been hit by a tube train, every bone shattered—but she knew just how much it would fucking hurt.

For the first time she saw a flicker of doubt on the vampire’s face, and then he roared.

Rose closed her eyes.

Her eyelids lit up, a brief flash that caused her skin to crawl with heat and her nerve endings to burn. Darkness did not return instantly, but faded back again against the painful gray. But from the vampire she heard only screaming.

Marty had started the job with his slingshot, and Francesco had finished destroying the thing’s left eye with the brief flash of UV light. They had only ever used the light four times before, Francesco had told her, and never since she’d been turned. Jane and Patrick called it an evil, but to Francesco it was a necessary one. As the oldest among them, he knew only too much how essential it was to be at an advantage in a fight between vampires.

Rain said such a weapon made them too human.

Rose stood, her first reaction to turn and look for Marty. But then she saw Francesco. He was spattered with blood, his eyes wide, and Jack was not behind him. Plan’s changed, Rose thought, and that could only mean…

Screaming from downstairs, smashing glass, and the whole house shook as something crashed against internal walls, crushing and splintering plasterboard and wooden studs. Another scream, and this one was quickly cut off.

Someone shouted in the language the vampire had used yesterday, and Rose knew that voice could only come from another beast.

“Mum!” Marty shouted. “Dad!” He looked to Rose first, but he was her only concern.

“Rose!” Francesco said. “Go and help them! There were two more, but one was already inside.”

“A trap for our trap?”

“I suppose so.” Francesco was already advancing on the fallen vampire. The monster clawed at his charred, ruined eyes, black fluid running from the sockets as the initial touch of UV light continued to burn its way deeper. It might reach the brain, Rose knew, or maybe he’d managed to close his eyes a fraction when he saw what was about to happen. Either way, she knew that Francesco could not now leave him alive.

Marty darted for the door, but Rose beat him to it.

“Help them!” he pleaded. There was more violence from downstairs, and Rose could tell from the sounds that reached them that this was between vampires. Whether or not her old parents had been caught, they were too late to influence the outcome now.

“If you want to stay alive, you do as I say,” Rose said. “I need you to—”

It was a stupid trick. They’d pulled it on each other a hundred times before she was turned, sometimes just for fun, other times to steal each other’s food or sweets. Marty looked over her shoulder, eyes growing wide, and shouted, “Look out!” and even as Rose ducked and turned she knew what he’d done. She reached without looking and her fingers snagged on the back of Marty’s shirt, but the fabric ripped and he was gone.

“The boy’s not our concern!” Francesco said, kneeling on the fallen vampire’s neck.

“Fuck you, Francesco,” Rose said. She left the bedroom and went after Marty. If she was very fast, and her brother was very lucky, he might still live.

From the landing beyond the bedroom door she could already see the extent of the chaos. It was a balcony landing with a view into the hallway—she remembered her parents saying it was what had attracted them to the house over three decades before—and down there she could see two struggling figures. One was Patrick, the other a short, thin woman whose face was split by a sharklike mouth, and they were slashing and snarling and biting at each other like fighting dogs. Even though Patrick had the advantage of height and reach, the woman seemed to be faster and more familiar with such violence. Patrick’s growls were anger and effort, while the woman’s snarl was pure ferocity.

There was blood splashed up the walls. The remains of something living was being kicked around the hallway and stepped on, flesh slick on the tiled floor. A knot of bloodied gray hair attached to a chunk of dripping skin swung gently from the hall lamp shade. Rose’s father had been bald even before she was taken, and her mother had refused to dye her grayness.

At the bottom of the staircase, Marty sat huddled against the wall. The bravado he’d shown in his bedroom minutes before was gone. Rose felt a pang of pride in her little, living brother, a terrified kid who’d used a slingshot against a fucking vampire and then still found the courage to come close enough to splash it with battery acid. Faced with danger, he’d reacted with real balls, but faced with the ruin of his mother—the blood and meat; the shattered bones scratching across floor tiles as Patrick and the woman kicked them; the spattered hair and chunks of glistening things that belonged inside a body, not outside—he had crumpled.

Rose looked at the mess of meat and tried to feel something, but the only sensation was hunger.

She growled in anger at herself and descended the staircase in one leap.

Marty looked up and screamed. She grabbed him, no more niceties now, and tried to assess the situation.

Patrick had the woman vampire against the splintered front door, and he was trying to force her through. She fought back but he stood his ground, taking the terrible wounds and pummeling her harder and harder against the vicious splinters. It was a hardwood door, Rose remembered that much. She hoped it would hurt the bitch when he finally impaled her there.

Across the room, the living room door was off its hinges. Furniture in there lay scattered and broken, but Rose sensed that whatever drama the room had witnessed was now over. She should get in there and then out through the window, flee this chaos and get Marty hidden away. She would take whatever Francesco would do to her for leaving them to fight alone, but for her this had always been about Marty. Always.

She darted across the hallway, carrying Marty under her left arm like a bag of meat. She heard his groan as she splashed through the remains of their mother, and her tongue throbbed with bloodlust.

In the living room, she found Rain’s body propped against the wall beside the fireplace. The Humain’s head been torn off and crushed on the marble hearth, the stark shell of her broken skull surprisingly bright in the artificial light. For the first time she understood the look of shock on Francesco’s face when she’d first seen him upstairs.

From the hallway she heard the vampire’s scream as Patrick forced her down onto the sharp shards of the broken door. From beneath Rose’s left arm, her brother whimpered.

“Rose!” Jane appeared at the shattered sitting room window. She had been running, and there was a vicious gash across the bridge of her nose, the wound having just missed both eyes.

“What’s happening? Where’s the third?”

“We lost him. He was…” She looked at Rain’s remains. “Fucker. He was waiting under the stairs.”

“Dad?” Marty whimpered.

“He took the old man,” Jane said, glancing at Marty and raising a disapproving eyebrow at Rose. Dinner for later? her look said.

Patrick entered the room behind her. His face was a mess, teeth and lips dripping with blood, and Rose took a step back toward Jane and the shattered window.

“It’s my own,” he said. “That one’s dead. Francesco’s coming down; we need to go.”

In the distance Rose heard police sirens. Some of the neighbors must have called for help. It was one of their golden rules to avoid contact with police at all costs, whether it be a random check when they wandered at night or something more serious.

“Dad…” Marty whispered. He started struggling and she held on harder, not wanting him to go back out into that hallway. She could smell the rich stench of spilled blood and insides, and when she glanced down at Marty, for a second it was the suit glaring back in terror.

After several thumps from the hall, Francesco appeared in the doorway. “Come on,” he said. “Where are the others?”

“Jack and Connie are still trying to find the one that ran,” Jane said.

“Might be a trap. This was. Jane, go and find them, tell them to meet back underground. And for fuck’s sake, make sure you’re not followed.” He nudged the door open so that they could see the prone vampire he was dragging behind him. His neck was broken, arms crushed and bent at awful angles, both eyes a melted mess. A long way from destroyed, but further from alive than he’d ever been.

“What about that one?” Patrick asked.

“This is just what we came for,” Francesco said. “He’ll talk, given time.” Then his eyes settled on Marty, still struggling feebly in Rose’s grasp. “Rose, you know you can’t take him.”

“I know,” she said. “But…”

“He’s not your brother anymore, Rose,” Francesco said.

“I am,” Patrick said. “We’re all your brothers and sisters.”

“I know,” she said again, trying to project confidence. They have our father… and I just stepped through our mother.

“Meet us,” Francesco said. He gave Rose a last, lingering look which she did her very best not to translate as she saw. But as he left with the damaged vampire, Patrick set about gathering Rain’s and the dead vampire’s remains, and Jane dashed away to find the others, Rose knew what the unspoken command had said.

Kill him.