The Darkening Dream (38 page)

“Can one of you translate that into plain language?” Mrs. Williams said.

“It’s this crazy guy from the mill,” Anne said. “He’s been bothering the boys, bullying them. We didn’t think he would really hurt anyone.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” her mother said. “First your sister gets terribly ill, now some horse-killing lunatic is chasing you?” She seemed to really see Alex for the first time. “Get that boy off the floor and let’s take a look at his back.”

All three women helped Alex to his feet as Sam and Mr. Williams came back into the room. Sam carried two shotguns.

“The police will come when they can,” Mr. Williams said.

A heavy thump sounded from the window. Anne screamed.

Bucephalus’ face was pressed against the glass. His tongue lolled to the side and a huge gash crossed his forehead. The vampire had destroyed one of his eyes and laid the flesh open to the bone.

Alex heard a chorus of screams behind him.

Oh, Jesus. The vampire had torn his head off.

The disembodied horse head traveled back and forth across the windows. Alex thought he could just make out the vampire’s black sleeve holding it like some demented puppeteer. Bucephalus disappeared from the left window and reappeared at the right. Mr. Barnyard chased the head from one side to the other, barking and growling, inciting ghastly shrill laughter from outside.

Mr. Williams grabbed a shotgun, broke it open, and inserted two shells.

“Let’s teach this lunatic a lesson.” He stepped toward the door, but Sarah leapt in front of him.

“Sir,” she said, “let the police handle it. We shouldn’t make a bad situation worse.”

He considered, nodded, then threw the deadbolt. It didn’t matter, of course. It wasn’t the lock that was keeping out the monster.

“Sam,” he said, “check all the doors and windows.”

Sam left again. The girls helped Alex out of his jacket and shirt, shredded beyond repair. He couldn’t raise the arm with the bruised shoulder.

“That’s a pretty nasty cut,” Mrs. Williams said. “You’ll live, but you need some stitches. I can do them if you don’t mind a bit of a scar, or I can call the doctor.”

“I’d rather you just get it over with,” he said. Any doctor who came out tonight would end up in the grave.

They relocated to the library and Anne brought her mother a pile of supplies and a bottle of whiskey. Alex took a couple of quick swigs, but the cleaning and sewing still hurt like hell. Much more painful were the memories: Bucephalus nipping his shoulder while being groomed; whinnying when he saw Alex approach; circling the paddock, his muscles liquid energy under his sleek ebony coat, running for nothing but the sheer pleasure of it.

The police came and went — two of them, the older with an Irish accent and a bushy silver mustache. Alex told them a slightly more polished version of the half-lie he’d given the Williams. They’d promised to look into it, horse-killing being a felony. Alex hoped they waited until the morning.

With the intruder apparently gone, the Williams parents went to bed, and the rest of them gathered in Sam’s room. The pain in Alex’s back had subsided to a dull throb. He felt like he’d been pushed through one of the mill’s picking machines, his mind packed into a brick of senseless cotton.

Out Sam’s window he could see the front porch. Dark stringy shapes hung from the trees. Lord Jesus, they looked like horse guts. He closed the curtains.

“How’s your sister?” he asked the twins. “Any better?”

Anne sighed. “She hangs on, but she’s buried so deep we’re lucky to get five minutes of Emily in a day.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Alex said.

Sam closed the door to the room.

“Can it get any worse?” he said. “First we fail to kill the vampire, then Emily’s cure doesn’t work, and now the vampire kills your horse and knows where we live.”

“Are you sure it was him?” Anne said. “The bugamoor guy?”

“It was him.”

“How’d he find you?” Sarah asked again.

“No idea,” Alex said. “I was riding down the road into town and there he was.”

“So you led him here?” Sam looked more depressed than angry.

“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I didn’t exactly have time to think. I was outside, under attack. If I hadn’t run into the house he would have killed me.”

Three pairs of eyes seemed to accuse him. He looked down at the floor. And then, with no warning, from nowhere and everywhere, he heard the voice.

It is the Greek’s fault, he brought the trouble upon you. Kill him!

Alex’s breast burned as if someone had dropped a hot coal down his shirt. Glamour again. He looked up to see Sam lunging through the air. They collided hard, and bowled Alex out of his chair. The back of his head slammed into the floor, and his stitches pulled painfully.

The voice. The vampire could make them think whatever he wanted.

Sam punched him in the nose.

He saw an explosion of stars.

All his fault, kill him
, the voice shouted soundlessly. Alex’s chest flared once more with heat.

Sam’s weight pressed down on him. He strained to breathe. The other boy’s face wore the red mask of murder. Blows rained down on Alex while he struggled to get his arms between the heavy fists and his face.

Forty-Four:

Donation to the Cause

Salem, Massachusetts, Tuesday, November 18, 1913

P
ARRIS WORKED NAKED WHILE
he and Betty labored to finish the model. The fewer extraneous influences, the more potent the sympathy. And why sully one of his few suits?

Mr. Nasir had brought the body as promised and allowed Parris to use his dining table as a makeshift workspace. Not that the vampire was much for eating in. Betty volunteered to help him scrub the place and extract the iron nails from the floorboards. Watching her rump bob was great fun, even if he did have to double-check her work. One nail would be more than enough to ruin his model. He arranged a little crate for her in the corner, outside his ritual circle, scrubbing her feet himself every day to reduce
impurities
.

She still wore her ancient corset but today she’d removed her skirts and knickers to facilitate the display of her
filthy
temptations
. Such distractions were useful, for they generated concupiscence he channeled into his masterpiece.

And a masterpiece it was — the degree and depth of sympathy profound.

“Observe,” he said. “Stay on your crate, don’t break the circle — the temple is square in shape, oriented cardinally. Here is north.”

“And how is this important?” she asked.

“The devil’s in the details, my love. Both this model and the physical home we intend to enter are sympathetic analogs of the ideal celestial temple.”

“Solomon’s Temple?” she said.

“Depends on your point of view. There was once a historical temple in Jerusalem where the ancient Hebrews stored the Ark of the Covenant. But more important is the pure and abstract
form
.”

“
Form
as in Plato?” She smiled, cracking the sores around her mouth. “The perfect version of something, transcending the flawed shadow cast into the real world?”

“You’ve read Plato?” Betty was clever but hardly educated in the formal sense.

“One of my lovers in the 1820s was a philosopher.”

“So when I’m dead and gone you’ll regale your twenty-first-century boyfriends with tales of your witchy paramour?”

She tapped her dirty fingernails on one knee, and opened her legs to give him a glimpse of what lay between.

“In the meantime, Toy, I’m all yours.”

“Good to know succubi are exclusive.”

“We usually aren’t, but I’d never cheat on you.” She blew him a kiss.

“You probably say that to all your lovers.”

“But with you, I mean it.”

He wanted to believe her. “Anyway, my model — like the real temple — has both an outer and inner wall. The outer courtyard was accessible to anyone, the inner yard only to priests. And along the west side is the central sanctuary itself, flanked by two great pillars.”

He pointed at the other end of the table, where the moldy corpse of the donor lay. The small body had hardly been pristine when Mr. Nasir delivered it, but now it was just a pile of loose parts.

“Tell me what you used to make it.” Betty humored him in so many ways.

“The walls I built with a mortar of ground bone. The columns are mostly finger bones, but the big central pillars were cut from a femur.”

“And the slabs of roof?”

“Rectangular sections of skull.”

“What else is in there?” she asked.

“The pavement is made from donor teeth. And I used what remained of the liver for the Molten Sea, the big tank of holy water that sits in front of the sanctuary.”

“Can I have the extra parts? Nothing like a severed penis to put an incubus in his place.”

“Don’t play with the donor!” he said. “Maybe after the book is in my hands.”

Betty spat, fortunately outside his ritual circle.

“That damn book is going to get you killed, or worse. Look at your hair.”

He ran a hand through the whitened patches that clung to his scalp.

“When the Moors were out yesterday and the vampire asleep, you looked for the book?”

She kicked her bare heels against the crate. “Too yellow to search yourself?”

“You know he can smell where I’ve been, and I had to work on the model.”

“He keeps it in the room with the painting.” She shuddered. “It’s just sitting on an end table.”

“At least we know where it is.”

“You can’t trust the bloodsucker, Toy. Look how he’s treated you.”

She’d never liked him associating with other people — he tried not to think about what she’d done to that girl he favored in ‘02.

“Mr. Nasir needs me to treat with his demon,” he said.

“Treat with me instead!”

She put a bare foot on a corner of the crate so as to spread her legs wider and pressed first two, then three fingers inside herself.

Damn. This column was too tall. Parris carefully worked it loose, then stepped over the circle, his chest splattered with dusty flesh and bits of bone. He locked the remains of the finger bone inside the carpenter’s vise the Moors had provided then began to file down the end.

Forty-Five:

Light in the Dark

Salem, Massachusetts, Tuesday night, November 18, 1913

S
ARAH CHEERED
S
AM ON
as he pummeled the spineless betrayer. To think she’d ever liked him, even kissed him. She spat on the floor.

Ladies, open the drapes
, the voice whispered. Now the lips that spoke
those
words, those she could kiss forever, locked in eternal bliss. She lurched toward the window, but Anne was closer and moved to open the curtains. How dare that hussy?
He
wanted Sarah to open them. She shoved Anne aside and finished the job herself.

The back of Sarah’s wrist stung. Anne had clawed it, jealous bitch. Sarah pushed her back into the wall.

She returned to the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, but she was disappointed. She called to memory his delicate features.