“We have another problem?” I asked in confusion.

“Of course. It said it had a partner, now didn’t it?” The vampire asked, and then he leaned backwards - his knees not even bending - as an eight-inch spike passed through where his head had been.

-

Moving smoothly back to his resting position he then leaned forwards, another spike passing behind him.

A flurry of spikes followed, the vampire smoothly slipping and sliding past each of them, eventually transitioning from his weird kneeless bend to some sort of dance.

“But as I was saying,” Joseph said, apparently unconcerned about the shards of death raining out of the sky. “I believe it was something the princess said to me when I was on the moon. This was shortly after we’d met - I’d saved her from Kruller’s haunted doughnuts, moments before she was roasted and turned into savoury stuffing - and we didn’t yet know each other well.”

The other automaton struck the clearing like thunder and lightning. It was even larger than its partner, standing over twelve feet tall. Each of its claws were two feet long, sharp hooked things that stuck out in a point from where fingers should be. Two lower hands emerged from cavities within its chest, a pair of cannons spraying the clearing with miasmic energy.

I leapt behind one of the trees; Joseph knelt under the corpse of the first automaton, using it as a shield. He pulled a pistol out of his coat pocket. The glow of his eyes shifted to umber, his pistol crackling with the same light. It fired, the crack of the gun followed by a boom, as the robot’s knee was reduced to shrapnel.

The automaton tumbled forwards and kept tumbling, hitting the ground and starting to roll as its body reshaped itself into a great spiked ball.

“Time to run,” Joseph said cheerily. And then run we did, dashing as fast as our legs would carrying us down the hill and across the graveyard, the mechanical malignancy in chase.

“I was telling her about my quest,” the vampire shouted, somehow deciding that now was the appropriate time to continue his narrative. “And how I was looking for evidence of the inexistence of humans among themselves. She found this greatly amusing, as I understood it, laughing so hard she fell back into the moon moss that coated the abandoned tunnels.”

The spinning robot of death hit a tilted tombstone and flew off, transforming in midair back into its humanoid form. It descended from the sky like a comet, slamming into the vampire and pounding him into the earth.

“I asked her for her thoughts, as we walked those ancient halls. She thought deeply on the matter - she had the time, for we had fallen into the nest of a murklug, and one must always speak carefully in their dens.” The vampire glibly remarked from under the automaton. Putting his hands down on the ground he pushed upwards, shrugging the thing off and casting it aside.

The bot raised its left hand, its claws transforming into a great spiked mace, and tried to turn the vampire into undead paste upon the floor.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“I merely remained silent. Now that I had made my aims known to her, it was sufficient for me to listen, while I sought to end the vile beast that had us in its clutches.” The mace slammed into the vampire, the creature not even bothering to dodge, tanking the blow as he was driven to his knees in the dirt.

“A bit like this vile beast?” I asked, wishing I hadn’t dropped my shovel in our mad dash. I still had my truncheon, but something told me the length of wood would be entirely ineffective in harming the thing.

“No; a murklug is a monster of the old era, whose ancestors once dwelt under the beds of children in peace - fulfilling their noble duty to scare kids in the dark - until one day they fell under that most dread of spells: postmodern literary criticism. It ate away at their souls and turned them from cheerful fellows into morbid and murderous demons, whose only skill was tearing apart the threads of language - and, once they were done with that, your body.”

The vampire’s own claws raked the automaton’s mace, ripping through the weapon; hooking his foot under the thing’s own he unbalanced it, sending it hurtling back. “This one had undone my spells by observing that ‘spell’ can mean both magical workings and the act of articulating letters, and had then deconstructed my pistol through techniques too evil to mention.”

The robot slammed the vampire with its shattered arm, sending him flying into the midst of the graveyard proper. The vampire stood up outside a mausoleum, dusting himself off, and spit black bile onto the ground.

Twice the automaton stomped its feet, metal cables slinking out from under its plates and knitting its knee back together. before preparing its final charge. Joseph braced himself to receive it.

“And then it was that she said those fateful words to me - the words that would echo through my mind again and again, and again when I saw the officer.”

The automaton launched into its final charge. Joseph braced to receive it.

And then the doors of the mausoleum opened. Fog billowed it, so thick I found myself quite incapable of seeing anything. A great pair of lamps, far larger than those of the automaton, flickered briefly from out of the dark of the doorway, and then there was a sucking sound. A moment later the fog cleared, revealing a still braced Joseph… And no robot to be found.

“A-hum,” humphed a voice from inside the mausoleum. It was all that was dignified and ladylike, and I felt myself straightening up a little as its almost visceral displeasure washed over me.

“Sorry, Gertrude,” the vampire said sheepishly. “It won’t happen again.”

“See that it doesn’t,” humphed the voice, before the mausoleum doors closed with a crash.

Silence fell. It was broken only after several minutes by the ever loquacious vampire who, still embarrassed, remarked, “We should leave. It will take her a while to return to sleep, and we wouldn’t want her to think we were unduly disturbing her rest. Besides, we need to dispose of the other body.”

“There is one thing I’m curious about,” I said after we had strolled over the next hill, and were far away from Gertrude. “What did the princess say to you? You told that immense story - ignoring several rather conspicuous gaps in the telling - yet you never actually revealed what it was she said.”

The vampire looked up into the Heavens and smiled.

***

“So, the problem is how to prove that human beings are things that live and breathe and think and feel, and not just shambolic heaps that look as if they live and breathe and think and feel, but in fact possess only the semblance of life. Hmm,” the princess said, thinking deeply upon the matter. “This is quite the conundrum. But tell me, wouldn't these shambolic heaps be identical in every respect to human beings from a purely external perspective?”

“Yepperonees,” I agreed.

She tilted her head. “But wouldn’t that you mean you need to believe in humans, to see that they’re there?”