A Coven of Vampires (4 page)

They’d aroused me—
me
,
an old man. With their panting and moaning and slobbering. I was sweating with their sweat and shaking with their vibrations; and all I could do was sit there, stricken and trembling like a man immobilized as by the touch of some strange female’s hand in his most private place; yes, actually
feeling
as if some unknown woman had taken the seat next to mine and started to fondle me! That’s how engrossed I had become with what was happening be hind me, there in the back row.

Suddenly I was startled to realize that we were into the last reel. My God!—but what had happened here? Where had my film and my memories gone? A little bit of nostalgia was all I had wanted. And I’d missed it all, everything, because of them.

Them….

Why, I could even smell them now! Musty, sweet, sweaty, sexual, biological! I could
smell
sex! And a mouth gobbling away at flesh only inches from my ears! And a frantic gasping coming faster and faster, bringing pictures of some half-exhausted dog steaming away on a bitch!

Lovers? Animal excitement? They
were
animals! Young animals—
and right now they were feasting on each other like…like vampires! Oh, I
suppose
you could call it petting, kissing, “canoodling”—but it wasn’t the kind I used to do. Not the kind me and my lass had indulged in, all those years ago. Kissing? I could hear them
sucking
at each other, foaming away like hard acid eating into soft wood. And suddenly I was angry.

Angry with myself, with them, with everything. The film had only fifteen minutes to run and everything felt…ruined. Well, now I’d ruin it for them. For him, anyway.
You won’t come, you young bugger!
I thought.
You’ve denied me my pleasure, and now I’ll deny you yours.

Abruptly I turned the top half of my body, my head, and spat out: “Now listen, you two—”

They were like one person, fused together, almost prone on their long seat. The hoods of their macs were up and crushed together, and I swear that I saw steam—the smoke of their sex—escaping from the darkness where their faces were locked like tightly-clasped hands. The slobbering stopped on the instant, and a moment later…I heard a growl!

No, a snarl! A warning not to interfere.

Oh, pale and sickly he might have seemed, but he was young and I was old. His bones would bend where mine would break like twigs. I could feel his contempt like a physical thing; I
had been
feeling it for the last ninety minutes. Of course, for who else but a contemptuous lout would have dared all of this with me sitting there right in front of him? And the girl was just as bad if not worse!

“I…I…I’m disgusted!” I mumbled. And then I quickly turned my face back to the screen, and watched the rest of the film through a wash of hot, shameful tears.

Just before the lights went up I thought I heard them leave. At least I heard light footsteps treading the carpet along the back row, receding. Of course it could be the girl, on her own, going to “tidy herself up” in the Ladies. And because he might still be there behind me, sneering at me, I didn’t look to see.

Then the film was over, and as the people down front began filing out, still I sat there. Because I could still feel someone behind me, hot and salty. Because it might be him and he’d look at me, fishy-eyed and threatening, through those steamed-up glasses of his.

Eventually I had to make a move. Maybe they’d both gone after all and I was just an old coward. I stood up, glanced into the back row, and saw—

God! What had he done to her?

The rain mac was open top to bottom. She—what was left of her—was slumped down inside it. There was very little flesh on her face, just raw red. Breasts had gone, right down to steaming ribs. The belly was open, eviscerated, a laid back gash that opened right down to the spread thighs. There were no innards, no sexual parts left at all down there. If I hadn’t seen her before, I couldn’t even have said it was a girl at all.

These were my thoughts before I noticed the true colour of the mac. I had only thought it was red at first glance, because my mind hadn’t been able to accept so much red that wasn’t plastic. And I saw his specs, crushed and broken on the blackened, blood-soaked baize of the double seat…. 

• • •

That’s my statement, Sergeant, and there’s nothing else I can tell you—except that there’s something terrible loose in this town that eats living guts and looks like a pretty girl.

THE STRANGE YEARS

He lay face-down on the beach at the foot of a small dune, his face turned to one side, the summer sun beating down upon him. The clump of beach-grass at the top of the dune bent its spikes in a stiff breeze, but down here all was calm, with not even a seagull’s cry to break in upon the lulling
hush, hush
of waves from far down the beach.

It would be nice, he thought, to run down the beach and splash in the sea, and come back dripping salt water and tasting it on his lips, and for the very briefest of moments be a small boy again in a world with a future. But the sun beat down from a blue sky and his limbs were leaden, and a great drowsiness was upon him.

Then…a disturbance. Blown on the breeze to climb the far side of the dune, flapping like a bird with broken wings, a slim book—a child’s exercise book, with tables of weights and measures on the back—flopped down exhausted in the sand before his eyes. Disinterested, he found strength to push it away; but as his fingers touched it so its cover blew open to reveal pages written in a neat if shaky adult longhand.

He had nothing else to do, and so began to read….

• • •

“When did it begin? Where? How? Why?

“The Martians we might have expected (they’ve been frightening us long enough with their tales of invasion from outer space) and certainly there have been enough threats from our Comrades across the water. But this?

“Any ordinary sort of plague, we would survive. We always have in the past. And as for war: Christ!—when has there not been a war going on somewhere? They’ve irradiated us in Japan, defoliated us in Vietnam, smothered us in DDT wherever we were arable and poured poison into us where we once flowed sweet and clean—and we always bounced right back.

“Fire and flood—even nuclear fire and festering effluent—have not appreciably stopped us. For ‘They’ read ‘We’, Man, and for ‘Us’ read ‘the World’, this Earth which once was ours. Yes, there have been strange years, but never a one as strange as this.

“A penance? The ultimate penance? Or has Old Ma Nature finally decided to give us a hand? Perhaps she’s stood off, watching us try our damnedest for so damned long to exterminate ourselves, and now She’s sick to death of the whole damned scene. ‘OK,’ She says, ‘have it your own way.’ And She gives the nod to Her Brother, the Old Boy with the scythe. And He sighs and steps forward, and—

“And it is a plague of sorts; and certainly it is DOOM; and a fire that rages across the world and devours all…. Or will that come later? The cleansing flame from which Life’s bright phoenix shall rise again? There will always be the sea. And how many ages this time before something gets left by the tide, grows lungs, jumps up on its feet and walks…and reaches for a club?

“
When
did it begin?

“I remember an Irish stoker who came into a bar dirty and drunk. His sleeves were rolled up and he scratched at hairy arms. I thought it was the heat. ‘Hot? Damned right, sur,’ he said, ‘an’ hotter by far down below—an’ lousy!’ He unrolled a newspaper on the bar and vigorously brushed at his matted forearm. Things fell on to the newsprint and moved, slowly. He popped them with a cigarette. ‘Crabs, sur!’ he cried. ‘An’ Christ—they suck like crazy!’

“
When?

“There have always been strange years—plague years, drought years, war and wonder years—so it’s difficult to pin it down. But the last twenty years…they have been
strange
.
When,
exactly
!
Who can say? But let’s give it a shot. Let’s start with the ’70s—say, ’76?—the drought?

“There was so little water in the Thames that they said the river was running backwards. The militants blamed the Soviets. New laws were introduced to conserve water. People were taken to court for watering flowers. Some idiot calculated that a pound of excreta could be satisfactorily washed away with six pints of water, and people put bricks in their WC cisterns. Someone else said you could bathe comfortably in four inches of water, and if you didn’t use soap the resultant mud could be thrown on the garden. The thing snowballed into a national campaign to ‘Save It!’—and in October the skies were still cloudless, the earth parched, and imported rainmakers danced and pounded their tom-toms at Stonehenge. Forest and heath fires were daily occurrences and reservoirs became dustbowls. Sun-worshippers drank Coke and turned very brown….

“And finally it rained, and it rained, and it rained. Wide spread flooding, rivers bursting their banks, gardens (deprived all summer) inundated and washed away. Millions of tons of water, and not a pound of excreta to be disposed of. A strange year, ’76. And just about every year since, come to think.

“ ’77, and stories leak out of the Ukraine of fifty thousand square miles turned brown and utterly barren in the space of a single week. Since then the spread has been very slow, but it hasn’t stopped. The Russians blamed ‘us’ and we accused ‘them’ of testing a secret weapon.

“ ’79 and ’80, and oil tankers sinking or grounding themselves left, right and centre. Miles-long oil slicks and chemicals jettisoned at sea, and whales washed up on the beaches, and Greenpeace, and the Japanese slaughtering dolphins. Another drought, this time in Australia, and a plague of mice to boot. Some Aussie commenting that ‘The poor ’roos are dying in their thousands—and a few aboes, too….’ And great green swarms of aphids and the skies bright with ladybirds.

“Lots of plagues, in fact. We were being warned, you see?

“And ’84! Ah—1984! Good old George!

“He was wrong, of course, for it wasn’t Big Brother at all. It was Big Sister—Ma Nature Herself. And in 1984 She really started to go off the rails. ’84 was half of India eaten by locusts and all of Africa down with a mutant strain of beriberi. ’84 was the year of the poisoned potatoes and sinistral periwinkles, the year it rained frogs over wide areas of France, the year the cane-pest shot sugar beet right up to the top of the crops.

“And not only Ma Nature but Technology, too, came unstuck in ’84. The Lake District chemically polluted—permanently; nuclear power stations at Loch Torr on one side of the Atlantic and Long Island on the other melting down almost simultaneously; the Americans bringing back a ‘bug’ from Mars (see, even a
real
Martian invasion); oil discovered in the Mediterranean, and new fast-drilling techniques cracking the ocean floor and allowing it to leak and leak and leak - and even Red Adair shaking his head in dismay. How do you plug a leak two hundred fathoms deep and a mile long? And that jewel of oceans turning black, and Cyprus a great white tombstone in a lake of pitch. ‘Aphrodite Rising From The High-Grade.’

“Then ’85 and ’86; and they were strange, too, because they were so damned quiet! The lull before the storm, so to speak. And then—

“Then it was ’87, ’88 and ’89. The American space-bug leaping to Australia and New Zealand and giving both places a monstrous malaise. No one doing any work for six months; cattle and sheep dead in their millions; entire cities and towns burning down because nobody bothered to call out the fire services, or they didn’t bother to come…. And all the world’s beaches strewn with countless myriads of great dead octopuses, a new species (or a mutant strain) with three rows of suckers to each tentacle; and their stink utterly unbearable as they rotted. A plague of great, fat seagulls. All the major volcanoes erupting in unison. Meteoric debris making massive holes in the ionosphere. A new, killer-cancer caused by sunburn. The common cold cured!—and uncommon leprosy spreading like wildfire through the Western World.

“And finally—

“Well, that was ‘When?’. It was also, I fancy, ‘Where?’ and ‘How?’. As to ‘Why’—I give a mental shrug. I’m tired, probably hungry. I have some sort of lethargy—the spacebug, I suppose—and I reckon it won’t be long now. I had hoped that getting this down on paper might keep me active, mentally if not physically. But….

“Why?

“Well, I think I’ve answered that one, too.

“Ma Nature strikes back. Get rid of the human vermin. They’re lousing up your planet! And maybe
that’s
what gave Her the idea. If fire and flood and disease and disaster and war couldn’t do the trick, well, what else could She do? They advise you to fight fire with fire, so why not vermin with vermin?

They appeared almost overnight, five times larger than their immediate progenitors and growing bigger with each successive hatching; and unlike the new octopus they didn’t die; and their incubation period down to less than a week. The superlice. All Man’s little body parasites, all of his tiny, personal vampires, growing in the space of a month to things as big as your fist. Leaping things, flying things, walking sideways things. To quote a certain Irishman: ‘An’ Christ—they suck like crazy!’