Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (65 page)

She could not have walked, even if there had been solid ground all the way over to the liana. She was not sure she could even get to her feet now. Her broken leg moved in a sickening way when she lifted it, like a fishing net full of gravel. She would never stand on that leg again, she knew.

She closed her eyes and forced herself to think of the goal ahead. This problem—this escape—could not be solved all at once. If she kept thinking about how hard it was going to be, she would never get away.

She half pushed, half rolled herself into the water.

The thing, the skeletal blood-drinking thing, was down there, sleeping on the bottom. It could reach up at any moment and grab her ankle, pull her down into its embrace—
please
, it had said
please
—

No, she would not think such things. She struggled to keep herself from slipping down farther into the water, using her arms to thrash and her one good leg to kick, twisting her head around to keep her eyes above the deep blue. She could feel the strength flow out of her as surely as the blood the thing had stolen, feel it drain from her limbs as they grew heavier, as they moved more slowly. She could feel herself slipping down into the water and knew she would never come back up once it closed over her plaited hair.

Kick—thrash—she swung her arms and it was hopeless, she would never get anywhere like this, she was making no progress at all, she had killed herself, and then—and then her fingers touched stone and she grabbed at it, but it was sheer, the smooth wall of the cenote, there was nothing to grab on to, she waved her arm wildly about, her fingers stretched as far as they could go and there—yes, there! She felt a rock just below the water, felt the bottom, another ledge, a ledge like the one she’d abandoned. She grabbed and hauled and heaved herself up onto it.

It was no more than an arm long, and half that wide, but it was a place to rest, to stop and just breathe, to recover some of her strength. She forced herself not to move, to lie as still and limp as she could without falling off this new ledge.

Eventually she opened her eyes and looked, to see what she had accomplished.

She had crossed perhaps five arm lengths of the way around the
side of the cenote. The distance she normally could have walked in two seconds.

She wept a bit then, but bit down hard on her tongue and stopped herself. Even weeping was going to kill her. It took away energy she needed.

She made herself think, think about what she had learned. She could swim, barely. She could move a little at a time. And there was more than just the one ledge below the water. Maybe there were plenty of them. Maybe there were ledges all around the circumference of the cenote. Maybe one below the low-hanging vine.

There had to be.

She forced herself to rest again.

Eventually, she made herself swim again. Rolling off the ledge into the blue water was a good incentive, to struggle a little more.

She found more ledges. Not as many as she’d hoped, and none as big as the one that had been her original place of refuge. But they were there.

Sometimes she would look down into the deep blue mirror of the cenote. When the ripples had gone, she could see her own face. See the blue paint on her cheeks, see the dark bands painted across her eyes and mouth.

She could not see the thing, the blood drinker. It slept deep.

She tried not to think about it down there, on its bed of the bones of all the sacrifices who had come here to please Chaac. Girls like herself, who had been willing to give away everything for the rain. It was obscene how the blood drinker profaned this, their resting place. Made it unclean.

How long had it been down there? How long had it been preying on the sacrifices, the ones who came before? It subsisted, she was certain, on the blood of those like her. On the blood of the dead girls who thought they were pleasing the god, who had no idea what thing they truly died to propitiate.

She would not let it have her, too.

She would not.

It took hours to make her way around the cenote. For every few thrashing seconds in the water, she would spend long minutes unable to do anything but lie there and breathe.

But she did not stop. She did not give up.

T
he liana hung down only three arms from the surface of the water. Its end was furry and loose, tufted like the end of a braid of hair. It was as thick as her wrist and woody in texture. She did not know if it would hold her weight.

It would have to. There was no other way for her to climb up and out of the sheer-walled cenote.

She spent a while fantasizing about what she would do once she reached the top. She could call for help and people would come with a litter, carry her back to the temple. They would want to know why she had struggled, why she had defied Chaac. But surely once she told them about the blood drinker, they would understand. They would forgive her, and welcome her home, and her mother would brush out her hair and scrub the blue paint from her skin. And warriors would come down on ropes and find the blood drinker and smash its bones with war clubs.

And someone else would be cast into the resanctified cenote, and the rain would come. Or maybe they would never do such a thing again. Perhaps the king of the city would outlaw such observances. The cenote would be abandoned, and in time, its water would run clear again.

She never wanted to see anything blue, ever again.

She could tell them. She could convince them. But first—

First she had to climb this liana.

And she was running out of time.

Already a shadow was crawling down the wall of the cenote. The
sun was sinking in the west and when it was gone, when darkness fell, the blood drinker would come back. It would come for her, and this time she did not have her thigh-bone club with which to fight it off. She had less than an hour left, she thought. She would have to use that time well.

She had found a ledge that was not too far from where the liana hung down. It was out there above the water, too far to reach, even if she could have jumped. But she was so close. There had to be a way.

Maybe—maybe she could make it swing toward her. She reached down into the water and felt around for a stone. What she came up with almost made her shriek, but she had learned in the last few days how not to scream. It was a human skull she’d picked up. Somehow she did not throw it away from her. The skull in her hand was just a dead thing, just bone bleached by water and sun until it was a bluish-white stone, that was all. Even when a little worm came wriggling out of the eye socket, she did not let herself drop the skull.

She lined up her throw very carefully. She thought of the players in the ball courts and how hard it was to make a goal through the stone hoop. It could take them days to score. She needed to strike the first time. She waited until her arm had stopped shaking, and then she threw.

The skull hit the liana a glancing blow. Enough to send it swinging, to make it veer back and forth, away from her, now closer, away—closer—

It was still too high for her to reach. Not from a sitting position.

The next part of her plan was the hardest. It was the one she’d forbidden herself from thinking about until now. How to stand up.

Her broken leg was useless, but her other one was still whole. It should be possible. Just moving was pain, but familiar to her now. It was not something that could be ignored, yet like a boorish houseguest who had overstayed their welcome, it could be worked around.

She pushed herself back against the cenote wall. Her wet shift stuck to the rock. On her back, she could feel a little warmth that the wall had soaked up during the day, but she could also feel it growing cool now as the shadows lengthened in the cenote. As darkness probed its long fingers toward the blue water.

It had to be done now.

She pushed herself up against the wall, grabbing at the warm stone with both palms, grinding her shoulder into the rock. She could hear herself grunting and sobbing in exertion, though she had no desire to waste energy on making sounds. She forced herself up onto her good foot. Instantly she felt waves of exhaustion ripple through her muscles. It was unbearable. The urge to shift her weight to her other foot—as stupid as such an idea was—could barely be suppressed.

Still the liana swung toward her, now away. And it was slowing in its pendulum swing, getting farther away each time before it swung away from her again. She kept one shoulder against the wall and reached out for it with the other and knew it would not be enough.

She let some tears explode from the corners of her eyes. Gave vent to a cry of frustration. She couldn’t do it. She could not escape, not even after all this effort, all the wrenching, excruciating work. She couldn’t reach.

The far side of the cenote was already in shadow. Darkness was seeping into the water. She was certain she could see the pale dome of the blood drinker’s head cresting the surface over there. She knew it was only waiting. It was weak, but not as weak as her.

She could see it moving. Edging closer, sticking to the shadow. Waiting. Only waiting.

“No,” she said.

And then she threw herself away from the wall, pushed hard, and launched herself out over the water, her hands stretching out
instantly to grab, to pull at the liana. Her left hand felt the woody length of it, and her fingers clamped shut. Her right hand reached up, found purchase. And then the liana swung away, swung hard, and she struck the far wall.

Her bad, broken leg was pinned against the stone, all of her weight, all of her momentum, crushing it.

She had thought she understood pain, that she had become a scholar of hurt. In that second white light lanced through her, exactly like lightning. Spears were driven through her chest, impaling her, keeping her from breathing. Her sense of hearing increased a dozenfold, so that she could hear the skin tear open as the sharp fragments of bone inside her calf cut their way out.

But somehow she did not let go.

Somehow she clung to the liana, and somehow, somehow, it did not break under her weight, and somehow, somehow, she was still alive.

She opened her eyes. Saw the walls of the cenote swing crazily past in scything rhythm.

She could feel blood trickling down her leg. Feel it dripping from her swollen toes. Wetting the liana. Dripping into the blue, blue water.

And when she looked down she saw—

—
them
—

There were dozens of them.

The one she’d seen, the one she’d fought, was just one of them. The fleshiest, the least decayed. Some of the others had only one eye burning in their skull heads. Some were missing limbs.

They were all dripping blue water. They were all so very, very hungry. They craned their heads upward, stretched their jaws wide to catch the little tiny drops of blood that fell from her leg.

Dozens—so many—crouched there in the dark. And she saw something for the first time that made her let go of the vine.

Some of them weren’t just blue from the water. Some were painted that way. Some of them had bands of black painted across their eyes and their toothy mouths.

Just as she had.

B
lue. Blue paint, paint so good, so durable, it was saved for the gods.

Blue for sacrifice.

Blue for eternity.

T
he tour guide mopped sweat from his forehead with a red handkerchief. “As late as five hundred years ago,” he said, and some of the tourists listened, and some just took pictures, the way it always was, “this was a holy place for my ancestors. A place of sacrifice. We’ll never know how many young people were thrown down here.” He leaned a hand on the wooden guardrail. “You’ve got to imagine what it was like, before we put these stairs in. A lot harder getting back up without them, hey?”

Some of them laughed. He didn’t care anymore if they liked his patter or not, except when they did he got bigger tips. He’d told the same joke every day for nearly six years.

“It was drought that ended the Mayan empire, you know? Not the Spaniards. Not aliens from space. They lived in these cities, all crowded like Mexico City is today, and they relied on the cornfields for food. When the rain didn’t come, they starved. They didn’t know why, of course. They thought their rain god was angry with them. So they threw their children down here. Divers have gone down in that water and they found at least forty-seven sets of bones. What’s that?”

One of the tourists had asked a question. “Did it work?”

They all laughed, this time.

“Well, if it had, we’d still be doing it, yeah?” Another laugh. The tour guide turned and started up again. Way too many steps. “Come
on, let’s let them sleep in peace, okay? No, I can’t let anybody go swimming down here. You see that blue? It would stain your clothes, that’s why. Our next stop is the famous pyramid. Yes, yes, you can take all the pictures you like.”

One by one they filed out, up the long wooden stairway to the surface. It was the last tour group of the day. Already shadows were stretching down the cenote’s wall, moving toward the blue water.

And when that darkness filled the cenote, the little sparks showed. The little sparks at the bottom of eye sockets long since eaten clean by fish. Little sparks of blue.

Please
, she croaked.

Please.

E
normous thanks to each of the contributors to this volume for bringing me their sharpest edges and darkest corners. Thanks to the entire Gallery Books team, especially to our maestro, Ed Schlesinger, and to my excellent agent, Howard Morhaim. Finally, nothing good is possible without the support of my wife, Connie, who doesn’t love the monsters herself, but who loves me . . . and that’s enough.

—Christopher Golden

JOHN AJVIDE
LINDQVIST
is the author of
Let the Right One In
,
Handling the Undead
, and
Little Star
.
Let the Right One In
has been made into two critically acclaimed films. The Swedish film won top honors at sixteen film festivals around the globe. The American remake of the Swedish movie, titled
Let Me In,
received rave reviews. Stephen King called the film “a genre-busting triumph. Not just a horror film, but the best American horror film in the last twenty years.”