Sophie Morgan (Book 1): Relative Strangers (A Modern Vampire Story) (26 page)

"If you like," Ferrers replied.

He didn't want to push too hard, she was the only opportunity he might have to uncover if something had happened there which involved Sophie - something that let her know vampires existed, possibly something which could threaten him, something which would ultimately mean she would reject, shunning him like Kasper. He didn't understand know why he was so drawn to her, but he needed to.

Eventually, she spoke. "It's really not on my doorstep, I think that's the phrase I've heard you Anglais use, and it's mainly largely only hearsay."

"Please, go on", Ferrers was business-like, but his tone had warm edge. She was his friend after all.

"A couple of months ago, a coven came here, wanting to settle for a while. As is the protocol, they found me to formally to ask permission. Very often, I'm happy for people to stay, as long as they don't cause me any great concern and are happy to tithe over some of their income, for respect you understand."

"Yes, of course."

"But I didn't like them, Charles, they were disorganised, I didn't want them here. There was a couple of women in the group, but the rest were men, Romanian mostly, except for a younger Danish man; well, younger in looks but older in our years."

"You didn't know them?" Ferrers asked.

"Most of them, no. They couldn't even tell me who had sired them. The lack of lineage was concerning, but I am nobody to judge these things as you well know. They had been travelling around for some years, making a living from stealing cars, robberies, muggings. I don't want that here, not in my city. But, I did recognise one of them - the Dane. I had met him once before. He'd passed through here once before, several years ago. He was acting as a spokesperson for the group, although I'm sure he was not their maker. It was he who had sought me out for my blessing to stay. He was more refined that the others. I told him that he could stay, the women too, I can use them, but they wouldn't be separated. I told him I had no problem if they wanted to move out of the city to another town, but I wouldn't tolerate disorder on my streets."

"So they all moved on?"

"Oui, "she replied, "but not without incident. It is my understanding that they killed a whole family en route to Antwerp. A little later, I hear that two of them have themselves been killed. Shot by an old woman, I believe. She survived, plus a young man and a woman, a much younger one, possibly in their early twenties. I don't have details I'm afraid Charles. Does this sound like something which could be related to your problem?"

"Survivors?" Ferrers asked, ignoring her question. "There were human survivors?"

"Yes, from what I can gather they all survived, but I'm not sure of the details. It's really only rumours and this only came to my attention when, shortly afterwards, one of my police informers contacts. He tells me that they've had some issues with a new vampire set, that they've also killed another man, and badly injured another. He tells me that one of the men has died; the other has survived and is in the hospital. One day, the survivor is telling him all sorts of tales about vampires, the next day he doesn't remember the events at all. Of course, we both know that means one thing."

"That a vampire has paid him a visit and interfered with his memory," Ferrers replied. He had done exactly the same thing many times as an Enforcer.

"Oui," Madame Renard replied, "I can only assume that it was one of his attackers, or another vampire who had an interest in keeping things quiet."

"May I ask what happened then?" Ferrers enquired, trying not to sound too interested, or too like an interrogator.

"This is the last I hear of it. Maybe they've left the country now and if so it's not my problem. The authorities have done what they can and so have I." It had to be Sophie, Ferrers thought. She had to be one of the survivors. "There's something else you should know Mon Aimee."

"Yes Margeaux?" He knew it, knew there was something else coming.

"The Danish man, he was a photographer. I'd met him at a gallery showing, ten, maybe fifteen years ago."

"Yes?" He knew it; he knew what she was going to say.

"I believe it was Kasper".

The world crashed around him, the ticking of the clock in his study chimed through his head splitting it in two, his blood boiled, and his dead, cold heart exploded within him. Kasper - the one who got away, the one who left him. Ferrers had made him to save him from death. He had found the beautiful young man bleeding out in an alley near Nyborg, beaten to a pulp by a street gang - all because he wouldn't give them his camera. Ferrers had arrived just in time, seeing off the gang and feeding the victim with his blood after gently sucking Kasper's from an open wound in his head. The boy was beautiful, somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one and Ferrers had been smitten. He hadn't felt lonely before but knew he would be if he had to spend an eternity haunted with only a memory of the young boy’s face.

He had carried the boy back to his apartments and watched over him until his conversion had been complete. But it was not an easy process. The boy had awoken, fevered and confused, and escaped. Ferrers had only stepped out to source food for his first feed. Hours later, delirious with hunger and the venom modifying each strand of DNA, Kasper had returned, demanding to know what Ferrers had done to him. He had collapsed into Ferrers' arms and Ferrers, himself confused with the pull that this boy had over him, nursed and fed him as tenderly as a mother with a newborn baby.

Ferrers had wanted Kasper in a way that he'd never wanted anyone before. But Kasper hadn't wanted him back. The sire bond became diluted by resentment and as soon as he was strong enough, Kasper had turned his back on him. Ferrers had spent a year nurturing him, feeding him, training him. He was his son, brother, friend, companion. But Kasper's bond to him had quickly descended from dependence to resentment and ultimately rejection. Kasper's last words to him had been cruel and vitriolic, spoken sharply and quickly before the door to their apartment had slammed shut and he had stormed into the night, carrying only a small holdall and his camera bag.

The experience had changed everything for Ferrers. He had returned to England, installed himself firmly in the family seat and stayed there. The world had changed now; people didn't know their neighbours and nobody paid much attention to the educated, accomplished gentleman who lived on the outskirts of the town. It was now easy to be unnoticed in the world, unless you wanted otherwise.

Margeaux had never met Kasper, but she'd heard Ferrers talk of him. She knew the name, she knew what he looked like. She'd also seen a photograph, a self-portrait which he'd left behind, and sketches that Ferrers had done; the likeness was good.

"Are you sure it was him?" Ferrers asked her.

"Yes, I am sure."

"Did he mention me? Then or when you met him before?"

"No, I am sorry; he did not." Madame Renard chose her words carefully." I suspected who he was, but as I told you our meetings were brief, and I had no way of contacting you. He told me his maker had been killed and I had no real reason to challenge his story. I would have told you, but you hide yourself away, my love, I don't even have a phone number for you. You really must come into the twenty-first century Charles".

"I understand." They were the appropriate words to say, although he wasn't certain that he meant them. "Where is he now?"

"Cherie, how should I know? Unless they have suddenly learned some self-control, I assume that he and his group have moved on somewhere else. If I hear anything shall I let you know?"

"Please, yes."

"Good, I shall ask my man to take your contact details. I must go; the Ambassador will be arriving any minute."

"Yes, thank you."

"And Charles, this girl you are so interested in must be very special if you are showing an interest in her." He didn't reply."

“Yes, I think so.”

“Then there’s one final thing I must tell you about Kasper.”

Ferrers waited in silence.

"The young man, one who survived the attack from Kasper's group - he did mention something at the hospital – thankfully it was too one of my informants, a nurse on duty. He was delirious at the time and his rants quickly faded – of course we know why. Apparently, the vampires that attacked him were looking for a girl too, the one who got away. Perhaps it's the same one, but I don't believe in coincidences and I know that neither do you. I can't imagine that those vampires would do anything without Kasper's permission. If they were looking for that girl, then so is he.”

With that, the line went momentarily quiet until he heard the gentle tap of the receiver being placed down onto the table. He didn't wait for the manservant to pick it up and take his details. He simply replaced the handset, calmly sat back into the quilted leather chair and looked out of the window at the Warwickshire countryside.

Perhaps he had been here for too long. Perhaps it was indeed time for a trip.

So, as you now know, this was not my first encounter with a vampire, but it was definitely the first time I’d had to clean one up off my kitchen floor. If you are anything like me, you will have watched your fair share of supernatural TV series and horror films, and you will have discovered that many of your assumptions about vampires are wrong.

You don’t need to stake them in the heart to kill them, although it’s quite possible that would work too, I’ve not tried it. Daylight definitely doesn’t kill them or at least not the ones I’ve met. You don’t have to decapitate them either, but my philosophy is that if you cut anything’s head off it will probably cease to function in its usual way, whether it’s living or undead. I’m not a trained fighter, I’m basically about survival, and I’ve found that whacking just about anything with force and frequency will stop it. Either that or blow its brains out. It seems to have worked for me so far.

When you kill a vampire they don’t just go "poof" and turn into cinders either. A well-timed breeze doesn’t come along and blow their ashes far and wide. There’s no sudden mound of dust, which you can suck up in your vacuum cleaner, more convenient though it would be. Maybe they disintegrate given enough time, I don’t know for certain, but they definitely leave a carcass behind, which at least leaves you with a problem in the short term.

I can’t say that I’m an expert on slaying vampires, or that I knew exactly what to expect when I woke up the following morning, but at the top of my list of chores was scrubbing my kitchen and disposing of the remains.

When I had finally gone back to bed, the body had looked reasonably intact, albeit it a bit on the mushy side, what with the pummelling with the bat and all. As only a few hours had passed, I had anticipated that it would look much the same. I wasn't very happy at the prospect of having to bury it, burn it or carve it up. I didn’t really have the tools or strength for any of these. Plus, they all involved touching it, the thought of which made my flesh crawl. I shrugged off the image with disdain, before I eventually cajoled myself out of bed and downstairs to the crime scene. I had a busy day ahead of me and the sooner I could get the nasty stuff done, the sooner I could forget about it and gather my thoughts.

On entering the kitchen, I was relieved to see that "melon head" didn’t much resemble a body at all anymore. Its volume had reduced considerably and it smelt vaguely of ammonia. The flesh had dried out and the dirty long hair was matted into what would have been the viscera. The skeletal infrastructure had crumbled and largely collapsed. In fact, what was laid upon my kitchen floor looked much like an old tarpaulin or a leathery old Egyptian mummy.

I wondered if all vampires looked like this once they were dead. I'd never been close to a dead one long enough to find out. But I did know one thing; I'd never seen one that looked like this one when it was walking about. Angry, yes, vicious, yes, but sane. Not wild with hunger. On the whole, they looked kind of normal, passing for human to the casual observer. You only knew what they were when they wanted you to. I wondered if this one had been literally starving. It explained why it might think that breaking into someone's house for something to eat was a good idea. I'd been under the impression that, on the whole, they were about discretion and tried to clean up their own messes.

As I gently nudged the carcass with my slippered toe, I wondered if he had been newly made, uneducated and left alone to forage for himself. Perhaps he was ill in some way or just plain mad. But there was no time for scrutiny; I needed to think about how I was going to get rid of the body. I felt very business-like and took a moment to give myself a proverbial pat on the back.

Looking out of the kitchen window into the back garden, I quickly dismissed any thought of burying the carcass. The earth was frozen solid and would take too long to break. Plus, I didn’t want to get seen by the neighbours or leave a suspicious looking mound of earth in the middle of my lawn.

The prospect of having to wait in the house with the body until it got dark wasn't an option. There was absolutely no way I was spending any more time with the decaying body than I had to.

On balance, I concluded that I could probably get away with packing him into a couple of bin bags and taking him to the municipal tip. Assuming the body continued to decay at a rapid rate, I might get away with just dumping it there. I wasn't sure what the process for handling waste was, but I hoped that it might just get incinerated and not transported straight to landfill.

Before I went about the clean-up, I filled a Charlie’s bowl with some fresh food and flicked on the kettle to make tea. Lovely tea, distracting tea, it helps make everything better.

While the kettle boiled, I took out a roll of big black refuse sacks from the cupboard below the sink, along with my rubber gloves, a plastic dustpan and its matching brush. I found a set of pliers in my small toolbox and removed all the teeth from the body. I was surprised how quickly they came out and put them in an empty mug so I could deal with them later. I then used the pliers and a pair of kitchen scissors to cut away the scruffy black shirt and trousers caked to the creature’s flesh. Once naked, I smashed the baseball bat into the bones.

It took only a few minutes to fold the vampire rubble in two of the heavy duty sacks, with the clothes in the third, which I then double bagged for good measure.

There was still some glass and brain matter scattered on the floor, which I swept up with a dustpan and brush. I took a mop and bucket from the under stairs cupboard and gave the floor a liberal soaking with a mix of bleach, multipurpose cleaner and washing up liquid. It did little more than dilute the dried blood and move globules of it around. After rubbing the excess off the floor with paper towels, I mopped again with a much better result.

I’d completed the whole thing within an hour and felt a bizarre feeling of detached pride. There was still the matter of a broken door to sort though. I didn't have any of the tools or materials required for a permanent repair, but I knew that I could call on our maintenance contractor to fix it. As the house I was living in was one of the rental properties which my mother and I owned, I was confident that he wouldn't mind popping over at short notice to help me out, even if it could be classed as a private job.

Tom, the builder, had done work for our family for years. He had originally started doing minor repairs on the shops and then, as my grandparents bought up cheap properties to rent in the seventies, he took on the maintenance of those as well. The relationship had served him well and he now had close to twenty people working for him.

The best I could do in the meantime would be to sweep up the glass and block the gap in the door with a bit of chipboard. I'd seen some stored at the back of the garden shed when I'd first moved in. I threw the bin bags onto the garden patio, so they wouldn't hinder my work, and then set about my business. It didn't take long to cover the hole with the board, add a layer of protection from the elements in the form of a bin bag, and fix the whole thing in place with duct tape.

Once finished, I searched for Tom's number on my phone and pressed dial.

Tom sounded genuinely happy to hear from me, although less so when I told him that some vandals had damaged my kitchen door during the night. He'd known I was going to be moving into the recently vacated property, but hadn't expected a call quite so soon and was sorry that it was under such circumstances. Of course he was happy to help, but he wouldn't be able to come around until later on in the day, as he had a few things on and he'd like to come and do the work himself. That suited me fine. It would give me a chance to get rid of the evidence.

A further convenience was that he had a key to the house. As the last tenants had moved out just before Christmas, he'd had some of his lads in to give it a coat of paint for me and to safety-check the boiler. He hadn't yet had the opportunity to return the spare key. I was happy for him to keep it, and told him that if he was coming around later he should just let himself in and get on with the job. I trusted him and needed to go out to run some errands.

While we spoke, I noticed the state of the carpet in the breakfast room. Although the majority of the damage had landed on the kitchen lino, there were still some blood stains which I didn't want to attempt to get out. I told him that I had been thinking of changing the carpet and had pulled it up. I asked him if he had an off-cut of carpet or linoleum that I could buy off him and if so, whether he could lay it. As it happened, he did, and as it was from a larger piece purchased for one of our other rental properties, there wouldn't cost involved apart from labour. Everything would be put on our account.
Perfect
.

After my phone call to Tom, I quickly ripped up the small square of carpet from the breakfast room, took a quick shower, washed my hair and threw on some jeans and a sweatshirt. Once I was back downstairs, I folded up the grubby carpet into a smaller, more manageable bundle. It would easily fold into the boot of my car with sufficient room to pop the body bags on top.

Remembering the teeth that I had earlier removed from the dead vampire, I emptied the mug down the sink and flushed them down with plenty of water. They made an awful clacking noise as they made their way down the pipe work and I hoped that they wouldn’t cause a blockage. Perhaps I should have flushed them down the toilet. Charlie looked at me, nonplussed, over his dish of dried food. "I know what I’m doing," I told him.

With that, I hurled the carpet up onto one shoulder, gripped the two body bags tightly in one hand and made my way out to the car. The timing couldn’t have been worse - my elderly neighbour's head popped over the concrete block wall separating are two back gardens.

"Having a good clear out?"

"Yes June," I replied, trying to sound normal. "You know what it’s like when you move in somewhere new; you just want to make it your own."

"I know, dear," she nodded, "I’m glad you’re going to be living there now. I didn’t care too much for that lot who were there before. People were always coming and going at strange hours. Very suspicious, if you ask me".

"Thanks, June, I appreciate it." I didn’t point out that my previous tenants had actually been a nurse and a security guard, so that’s probably why they were out at all hours.

She looked suspiciously at my kitchen door as she leaned over the wall to have a better nosey at what I was doing.

"You be careful, a young girl like you living on your own. You should have a man helping you with all that heavy lifting. It’s not right."

I smiled in an attempt to look like I agreed with her and then made my excuses to leave. I wanted to get to the tip, plus the small carpet was surprisingly heavy and my shoulder ached. I slung my burden into the boot of the car, all the time under the careful inspection of June, who was making a very poor attempt at looking like she was actually busy doing other things. Common sense told me that it didn’t actually take that long to sweep fallen leaves off your garden path.

After queuing at the gate for twenty minutes, amidst all the other weekend tip visitors, I finally managed to deposit my waste into one of the oversized skips for general waste.

"Good riddance to bad rubbish," I muttered to myself, dusting my hands off over the metal barrier surrounding the large metal container. I liberally sprayed fabric deodorizer around the interior of my car as I watched other people dump their bashed up furniture and sacks of waste onto mine, then drove off to a fanfare of impatient car horns behind me.

By the time I had completed the short drive home, there were two messages on my voicemail. I filled the kettle with water from the tap, flicked it on and pressed a number on the handset. It took me straight to my messages.

The first was from Tom. He’d called to say that he had everything he needed for my repairs and that the entire job would definitely be completed by the end of the day. He'd use his spare key to let himself in if I was out.

The second message was from a friend that I hadn’t heard from in a while and one that I half expected not to hear from again. The caller didn’t say his name, or at least I didn’t catch if from the garbled message, but I knew it had to be him because of the accent. I had mixed feelings; half pleased to hear from him and half angry.

Much of the message sounded distorted by poor signal and background noise, meaning that I caught only every other word, but I could just about make out a person’s name and the words dead. The blood drained from my face, my legs buckled beneath me and I slid down onto the kitchen floor.

When I got to the end, there was one word that was crystal clear and sharper than all the rest. It was then that I understood what the caller was trying to tell me. The word was vampire.

My head involuntary hurled forward and the vomit splattered across the kitchen floor
. Great Sophie, one more mess to clear up.

I listened to Mickey’s message several times, but could still only pick out every other few words. The signal was awful and it sounded like he was calling from a moving train. From what I
could
make out his brother had been killed by a vampire. I wasn’t sure when or where it had happened, but it would certainly explain why Mickey hadn’t been in touch. I felt guilty for moping over him, and for being angry at him for not replying to my calls and messages. But I still wasn’t in a better position to know what had gone on; the voicemail had been too garbled.