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A Vampire Scholar's Tale
Chapter Five: If It Hadn't Been For That Doorstepper...

Chapter Five: If It Hadn't Been For That Doorstepper...

I had already circled about the graveyard before. At the time, however, I had been respecting the instructions to avoid the graveyard proper - and had been hoping to respect them still, even after being plunged into the world of the undead and their quixotic machinations. Consequently I had yet to explore any of the barrows at the far end of the graveyard, from whence the scream emerged.

The graveyard was old, but the barrows were far older - relics of a time long before the graveyard, or even the city, ever existed. The structures were low, squat, set squarely amid the mushy earth at the edge of the lake, where the weird white worms wriggled and birds with too few feathers and an unusual number of eyes hacked and coughed raucously.

There, bordering the barrow nearest the lake, was a dead man. He was facedown in the mud, the tips of his fashionable coat drifting in the water, and had evidently been killed recently - no more than a couple minutes prior, for his lifeblood was still leaking out from a great big hole in the middle of his chest.

Any doubts I had as to whether this was a recent killing or a mere prank by one of the undead were swiftly settled by the vampire, who crouched down beside the corpse with a muttered imprecation, then motioned for me to come closer.

“Here; this is your job.”

“Shouldn’t it be the job of the police?”

The vampire gave me a withering look, effectively communicating with a glance how terrible he thought my idea was.

Just then a cleft opened in the side of the barrow, and the skeletal ghost of a unicorn wandered out. It looked into the starry sky for a moment, as if peacefully imbibing the sight, and then cantered slowly towards us.

“Well met, Joseph,” it said to the vampire, its voice a deep baritone. “It has been far too long since last we spoke; and I suspect, alas, this night will prove no more opportune.”

The horse turned its eyeless gaze upon me. “And you, sir? You are not one I have seen before.”

I tried to answer, but my voice died in my throat, my gaze fixed squarely on the smear of red decorating the ghost’s horn. The vampire, Joseph, had no such compunctions, going up to the unicorn and slapping it merrily on what should be its shoulder before gesturing towards me.

“Ah, gravekeeper, this is Anselm - you remember him: I mentioned his excellent epistemic dictum earlier, back in the midst of my story. Anselm, this is the new gravekeeper.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” said the undead unicorn.

My mouth uselessly squeaked up and down, my eyes still fixed on that smear of red, and the uncanny degree to which the horn of the unicorn matched the tear in the dead man’s chest. The unicorn must have caught my stare, for his skeletal head swung from me to the corpse.

“Oh, him? You need not worry about him. I ran into him, you could say, not long after he broke through the fence.”

And the unicorn gestured to the fence bordering the graveyard. It was among the best kept of the graveyard’s boundary markers, the posts standing tall and proud and relatively rust-free. On one of the posts, near the edge of the lake, I could see a tuft of fabric that looked suspiciously similar to the dead man’s jacket, and numerous poles which had been knocked over nearby as someone forced their way through.

“So he was a thief?” I asked, a trickle of relief flowing through me.

It is difficult for a horse to shrug, but the unicorn successfully did so. “Frankly, I haven’t the foggiest of clues.”

Silence followed this pronouncement, the barrows stilling save for the sound of the wind blowing over the downs.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You cannot beg a pardon, sir; a pardon is clemency, granted after and in spite of wrongs done, and it can only be delivered freely by the magnanimity of a king.”

I swallowed a desire to ask just what, exactly, he was talking about, and instead returned to the far more fundamental matter. “Then do you not know why he was here? Why did he so madden you?”

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“Why? Why? Why, he told me he was doorstepping. Doorstepping! Can you believe the nerve? Now there are many crimes I can tolerate, but doorstepping is not one of them; my governess was a vampire, and as she always taught me, one should never pass the threshold without first being invited,” the unicorn primly observed. The vampire nodded in agreement.

“So you gored him to death?”

“No. I merely put my head down and proceeded at a rapid pace in his general direction. That this course of action regrettably resulted in his untimely demise can only be seen as a secondary and implicit consequence of my actions and, therefore, is no fault of mine; after all, it was his fault for being in the same precise spot as that of my horn. Really, when you think about it, it was more like auto-annihilation.”

I groaned, but before I could say anything more the vampire coughed. “There was a warning sign, you know.”

And he pointed to one of the toppled over fence posts, where a sign could be seen bent over, a muddy boot print atop it. Through the incipient grime the following could be discerned:

WARNING

This is a Graveyard

It is a Home of the Dead

Do NOT Trespass

Unless You Intend to Join Them

“Go begging for trouble,” the vampire continued, “and trouble will find you. Speaking of, you made sure to exorcise his remains?”

The unicorn snorted. “I certainly did, precisely to keep him from coming back. I won’t tolerate any violators of the threshold rooming here.”

“Good, good.”

“So the gravekeepers know - or will know - that this happened?” I asked, trying desperately to steer the conversation back into normal waters.

The vampire’s burning eyes swung from side to side, considering. “Sure,” he said, in what was clearly a lie.

“Hah,” said the undead unicorn, tapping its rotting hoof against the ground, “reminds me of that time… remember… with the squirrels, and…?”

“And the submarine?” The vampire asked excitedly.

“Precisely,” Anselm concurred. “I still have Jack O’Lantern’s most hole-filled pair of socks; he bugs me for them on occasion.”

“Oh! - Ah, but we were in the middle of one story, and anyways, the tale of the squirrels in the submarine is one of our more boring ones - it drags in the middle, you know, when we slug-raced up the Hill of Molasses.”

“Not like any of your stories don’t meander,” I snapped, “now, if we may turn our attention to the more important subject - what do we do with the body?”

“What? The body?” The vampire remarked in some confusion, having apparently forgotten that there was a doorstepper, and that he had been gored to death.

“This body,” I swore, pointing at the bloody, mud soaked corpse. The vampire looked down at it in some surprise, only belatedly remembering it was there.

“Maybe we hide it in the lake?” Suggested the unicorn.

“You can just bury him,” Joseph provided helpfully. “It's not like the gravekeepers know the exact number of bodies anyways. If you need a headstone go ask John - he keeps an extra supply for every time this happens.”

“Oh, okay,” you said. “That makes things easier - wait a moment, every?”

“But as I was saying,” the vampire continued, and then paused. “Actually, where was I? Ah, I remember!”

***

The moon is a dangerous place. Its tunnels, dug in aeons past by the immortals who built it, were long ago overtaken by the Jaggothim, the many-sided horrors who dwell in the depths, their paths choked in weeds and madness. They go back and forth and thereabouts and criss-cross, weaving with all the fury of a distraught Arachne, and the path to the Man in the Moon is particularly difficult - it can only be found in dreams, and upon the scent of time.

Had it been in my hands alone, I might never have made it; I would have ended up lost, travelling the twilight gorges, or disappeared in the river’s endless webs. Fortunately, I had the princess with me, and-

***

“Hold it, hold it just a moment,” I cried, forgetting the dead body on the ground in front of me in my righteous and indignant fury. “The princess? What princess? Where? When’d she get here? And when’d you get to the moon? Also - the moon was built by immortals? Who’d believe that rubbish?”

Joseph shrugged. “If you say. There’s no sense arguing with those who won’t look, as if you don’t look, you won’t see. But to your more important point - respecting the princess, I had to pass through the Jungle of Unk to get to the Most Westerly Point, and while doing so I thought I’d stop in and-”

“Stop telling this story backwards,” I swore. “Now, you had crossed the sea by whirlwind. What happened next?”

The vampire blinked, a warmth filling his eyes, the flames mellowing. “Ah! You are right. Let me see…”