Chapter VIII
Three chimes. Perhaps there’d been a fourth. If there had been another, the gray man did not mark it. The witching knell battered his drums, Gorgotha’s ritual alarum jeering until the echo of the hour decayed. The figure of solitude ironed his focus, unwounded by the derision of the deepening night. That once scholarly ear, subsumed by the scorn of the small hours, checked his arms. With that assuring clink he steeled himself against the enfevered entropies hailed above.
Doctor Halloway marched on through the dank streets. The dourness of his task was etched on his face. Gallows’ knots under his eyes and the furrows of stress clenched his granite, knowing his desperation. His work this night had been fruitless thus far. The storm staggered his progress. He’d nothing to show for his pursuit and overlong absence from his vigil here, save for a new wound. The dull ache of that laceration had been kept from growing worse by treatment more rapid & searing than the sore’s potential spread. Still the fresh scar festered as a sign of his recklessness and the sentient gloom that endangered so many of the blissfully unaware.
The silver-maned shade gritted his canines and vowed his purpose. He’d no time to brood on his inability to divine & destroy the hydra’s heart. The forces of old night were recruiting; he could not stomach allowing another soul to fall to the coven’s hypogeal lure. Yet their song layered malefic seeds in the lull of the wind. Had he arrived too late? No. He could not humor such a defeating thought when battle called him, and one siren assuredly remained ahead.
Old Tidwell had not been fleet enough with the key-mold he’d offered, so Valdred made do with his own means. He tapped his cane, shook rain from his hat, ruffled dampness from his coat, and drew tools of precision to allow discreet entry into the benighted manor.
Sleep, akin to interment, constricted upon the helots of the mansion. Each servant, posed as cadavers, draped furniture and even floors across the corners of the Duskmont estate. The help having fallen prey to a domineering slumber. No snores or penitent aches of poor dreams were emitted from any one of them. Their caste remained muffled in contrast to the groans of the old foundations they abided in, encased in solemn quietude with what may become their tomb if it was not already. Mummified in repose at their posts; denied semblance of breath. He had no time to peruse their ailment. The source of their pale and breathless hex (and the shadow over their patron) must be staked and splayed before attending to this confounding affliction.
Folding his mind to meditations, each step emptied Valdred of thought. He moved with purpose, though he draped it in the silken darkness beneath his being. He allowed himself no traceable echo, engaged in the practice of death. An active meditation, where the infinite quaked through the absence of any feeling which would chain him. His heart still beat, and his breath flowed, but to the eye of malice he was just another backdrop on this little stage of being. Cloaked from the sanguine beast, his own reflections, & the fears they may betray, the weathered master navigated on unconscious understanding of the layout until his feet carried him to the Lady’s threshold.
Valdred tapped the heel of his stave against hollowed tile. His heartbeat burst with the sound, announcing himself gently enough. The chamber door was sealed yet Lucilla was not alone. He knew she was attended by company, for the foul suitor glared at him with eyes that chastised. Orbs of ire seared him through the wood & its ornaments. The shadow behind shuffled with unease, sending vermin skittering in a lunatic hysteria through forgotten pathways; in haste to flee or to burrow through. Throngs of unseen pests poked out tails & antennae and grubbed their feelers in wicked applause for the meal they might scavenge from this greater fiend’s claim.
The thing’s reaction was troubled. Slowed, perhaps, by a heavy gauze of confusion and – Valdred prayed – that one last defense he’d planted. That somber medicine which he’d sown into the rivers which the dusk-fiend was drawn here for could yield something besides guilt.
The door remained shut, even as the thing inside approached. Encumbered boots dragged down the hall behind. Sulfurous mist wafted from this entrance, dispersing with a pace more rabid and deteriorating than the rats below the cellars. Valdred adopted the ruse of surprise, allowing the splash of genuine unnerve to water his expression. As a bewildered old doctor, stammering in the wake of uneasy quiet, he turned to face his fellow actor in this drama. Prepared for a duel of facades, and burning at the crossroads of rival animism, the pruned guest awaited his cue.
A stubborn ghost, adamant in conforming its phantasmal thew to a body replete with the carrion of others, stalked the way to his crux. Pupils whittled their glints to daggers; the fiend’s eyes bore the rapture of all unclean spaces, the chained torrents which would devour pain & beauty in indiscriminate maw.
Valdred anchored his weight with his cane, swaying meekly, as the visitant stepped forth. A sconce between them reared up with incendiary glow. By the flare he recognized the face that swam through the alley of ornate midnight. With concerted effort, Val pulled relevant knowledge of what the figure once was as a man from the annals of memory. Guarding the most toothsome of these features he recalled with the din & rush of a natural, if awkward, attempt to place a name with a face.
The vessel the shadow seized had once been a sorcerer among aspirant physics. One who’d been hampered by a nauseous need for less than medicinal supplements to his diet. That urge for bounding spirits may well have endured the man’s profaned rebirth. His longing for blooded libations may outpour past the ghoulish needs of his pilfered body, to seek ever more draft from the wells on tap from whichever vein his sight may tackle.
Valdred sheathed his solution and coughed into a handkerchief. “Sir? Are you a servant of our lady?”
“I have served her more than any other. Alas, our bright host is yet recovering.” Spoke the pale dusk. The man shined his face for this intruder’s perusal. He was paler than the northern star but vital. Handsome rigor ran from his ageless bust through the lean muscle preserved under a midnight cloak. All creases of mortal stress and the maimed aether that ruled their mother city were exiled from his countenance. Opulent was his voice, a militant whisper that rumbled with the veteran authority of an anointed member of the house of lords. Molten gold surged from the color of his stare. “Just who goes here, asking after her?”
“Just an old physic. Doctor Halloway. A new servant to the health of Duskmont propriety. Come to assure the Lady’s safety from her sullen spell.” Valdred stumbled as he lifted a hand from his cane to shake this noble shadow’s bough. A keen grip snagged the pulse about his wrist, catching him.
“You should look after your own health all the same, doctor. These nights are driven with quite the pox – and worse elements in the air.” The night’s chamberlain tested the mettle of the man as his claw-fingered branch wrapped about the forearm. “I recognize you, doctor. Even sent letters to see if we might conjoin our minds in effort to trap and abolish Gorgotha’s sickness. Forgive this strange meeting.”
“Strange indeed.” Valdred pulled back from the hunter’s clasp, meeting no resistance. Each were assured by the broken farce of a shake that neither had arms hidden under sleeve, nor secret coif bearing the ensign of war upon the other. Yet this pale courtier before him needed no armor nor steel when his tools were in his teeth and spear-tips served his hand. “And you, gentleman? Just who is this guest of Lucilla’s patronage?”
“Ar-Ah.” The shadow stumbled, splintering its verbal gait. “Aldred Hallow.”
“A strange name. Fitting, for such uncanny company. Still, I fear I’ve met with thee before. Perhaps in more than one life.” The doctor fiddled with a bottle of solution, letting the pause in the air slurp up tension and douse any more belligerent assumption from his posturing. “Aldred? The provocateur from the ball. Yet what can your reason be for remaining here at the devil’s hour?”
For all the luster he leeched, Arden’s countenance blistered with befuddlement. He was flustered, not as quick as the sustenance a pure feast should have made him. “Like you, I am here to assure Lucilla’s wellbeing. As I am under her roof she is blanketed by my aegis, my knightly vow.”
“Is that so? How queer to hear of a Harrow being christened by any order of chivalry. No offense, I merely jest at the repute of your kin – though I am certain your house has been unfairly befouled before the ears of the courts.” Valdred shrugged. For a flash he seemed almost senescent, as forgetful as forgiving. Yet the silver in his eye spoke contrary to him owning only a dull wit. “Have you kept her pure against your own gallantry? From what noble vices hunger under that protection?”
Silence. A moribund compulsion invaded the air. The wordless breath from Aldred gained a dreadful proponent in the gorgon eye that towered over his offender. That cyclopean star glared monolithic fire, freezing any insult the old man could insist. The specter leapt from the craters it lodged in, furrowing into the physic’s cognition till the order appeared to be woven by his own unconscious. The cascades of alien intent were undeniable however, for the thrust of this order blared draconic lurs to this surplus guest, watching himself awash by the will.
When recognition returned to Valdred it was jagged and unkind. His meditations fumbled, the stoicism he pretended to wield had shattered in his hand, showing splinters. The fiend was not so depleted as the doctor’s haste had relied upon. He bit down on his pride, bleeding a small lesson from the lesion. He could not let his resentment for how this night had gone – nor those bled in the past - maim his caution. Once the square drawn for dueling facades dissolved, he’d need to be steel to face the claws this foe would whet for his weapon.
“O!” The imposter in Harrow bloated the vapors between them with tremulous odes to his good nature. “I am doing great work, my reverent peer. Supernal progress on the inversion of our city’s suffering. I could still use your hand in penning the miasma if your mind is keen enough to aid this task. Yet the knell of ambition has summoned me forth. Why cure one blight when you banish death forever? Aberrations that are unbending before the black breath, returning to its shape – though we might find it distasteful… They can be utilized to provide a synthesis, an equilibrium. A cure for poison from the serpent’s own fangs. Let them be inoculated from all pains the earth can conjure.”
“I wonder how our means may stray. Perhaps too distant though our goals appear near. Alas,” the withered scholar wheezed a faint conjecture, “the Lady’s health is my immediate concern.”
“She is kept from the knowledge of Death. My life is in this oath, the fervor I speak is true and lasting.” Harrow dismissed such cumbersome discourse, pointing down the hall. “If you are not bereaved of rest enough, allow us awhile to discuss these endeavors we might share.”
And is she defended against your carnal knowledge? Halloway nearly inquired. “’Twas something our lady said last that spurned my professional complacency.” Valdred persisted, digging nails into his arching temple to draw clarity to douse an elder’s puzzlement. “Her zeal at the prospect of the medicinal dose I offered not ‘being enough to carry her across the threshold’. I feared her sickness is of the soul. Infested with a grievous craving for-”
“Surely you can trust a gentleman’s promise, sir. You must hear my pledge as a fellow healer. Her spirit is free of all harm.” Insisted the spite through Harrow’s smile.
“Ah, I can barely trust my own eyes anymore. A grievance of age more than illness, I would wager.” Valdred tinkered with a case of bifocals from his coat. His hands trembled as if kindling friction amid an arctic bout while fiddling with them. “You do place your heart and hers on the same altar, I’ve no doubt. Sadly, time’s talons hath stripped me of my ability to decipher chivalry from chagrin. Forgive me this. Only, I fear any ill minded night comers leeching her despondency. The afflictions of our day have legs as well as wings. Sickness oft brings corruption to be sorrow’s bedfellow.”
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“Sir, this hour finds you most regrettably mad! You tread laps around an aimless base, slipping into rime with each step directed toward plague phantoms. Let’s cleanse these dread vapors with a round, shall we?”
“Mad? Oh yes, perhaps. I try not to degrade myself more with drink, reserving spirits for worthy celebrations or as a mourning coat. But, well, on nights like these…” He hobbled forward. Then his cane impaled the floor, halting firmly to pivot and return to Lucilla’s guarded chamber. “But I’d prefer to hammer my liver after having reasons for some small revelry. Just to see her breathing. To know my oath upheld.”
Harrow refused Val this gesture. Errant tails from his bleak coat lashed mist to obscure the door.
“My lord, you are wounded!” The basilisk’s iris licked the sown, odiously colored patch of skin beneath Valdred’s tunic. A pale claw pressed over the sight, in pose of compassion & medical curiosity yet placed as if to impose the threat of tearing those threads open and allowing the ache to gorge on release.
“Ah, yes. Just some ruffian who forgot his wits – but was sure to remember the knife he used to garner my attention.” The doctor’s groaning laugh embellished the pain with a charred cough. “Another symptom of our queen’s great city in her ill turn, I fear. Though I do pity them more than any of these scratches that their fallen condition has caused them to turn on me. We are among those who have failed them, in our pretense of stewardship.”
“Do not tire yourself, doctor. Waste no more of your heart by walking these mad circles. Come,” the fiend gestured toward the regal solar some meters away from Lucilla’s chamber, yet the rays of his intent never left Valdred. A lure, cast by belligerent gravity and tethered to that grave which refused to rot, hooked the man’s eye with its commanding gleam. Sit… Moonbeams burst from the study door, ajar. Though the space between the hinge and the stopper was slim, the room gaped at the pair, bidding company to shatter its fearful solitude. Rest.
Vile incandescence brandished a path toward the chair through the solar. The specter of suggestion gained lungs from that scathing illumination. Valdred evaded meeting the ambling ray head on, tilting his eyes from the glow but bowing to the hovering order woven by it. He confessed to an abrupt weariness and asked his host to sit in good comfort.
“Please, after you. I am old and there is too little light here.” Valdred spoke in tired huffs, leaning heavy on his walking staff. “Besides, my good knight, you seem to know your way around this house as though it were your own.”
“Tis just up there.” Harrow’s bony index pointed the way with the light to chase the sconces. “I will guard you from any fall your weariness may afford.” Vaporous gloom gained muscle to insist.
The curious alienist slouched in the seat demanded of him, assuming the posture of defeat. A spurious oblivion siphoned all memories & doubtful fears for the lady from his stare. His eyes sat blankly, misted by the spirits splashing in his glass. His foe humored him with chatter in the black hour.
Perhaps Harrow did not have the insatiable need to stomach another meal, or otherwise saw no worthy sustenance in this pruned doctor diluting his essence further with nervous libations. Lucidity returned to the elder. He condemned the gloom with an herbal cigar and the candlelight used to burn it. Emerald smoke stretched fingers from the corner of Valdred’s lips, scratching at Harrow’s cold mien and eclipsing his prattling maw.
“Have you any notes, theorems, or passing thoughts on the matter of our pale plague? I have toiled in my cousin’s estate for nights that splay to seem like years.” The shadow rambled. “I may have found some fruit but first wish your wisdom to set eyes and affirm it.”
Valdred flicked ash from his wyrd embers. Planting bifocals to rest on the bridge of his nose, he made a show of stumbling through scattered notes from his coat. Charcoal chords flitted from his throat through the fog on his breath. “I know not your exact means, yet I already have a quarrel with your founding theory. You implied before that you wish to immure death as much as banish one blight. But, although as men of medicine we should strive to ease the woes of our fellow men, death is only natural. It cannot be denied.”
“You would limit your talent, your horizons, to the chain pulled over the womb? Death is only revered as a law of the earth because we have yet to empower our knowledge & mettle to grow beyond its cage. But though our species was bred in the garden of the world, borne up from wild fens, we are not as meagre beasts. The will of mankind reflects nature, embodies it, yet we can evolve her through our efforts. We need not be slaves to suffering.”
“Ignoring the how of this gross proposition, let us tear back the why. Suffering is as vital a component to our existence, our needs, as oxygen or water. Without the net of death to catch our souls in her ordained force we would wish for the scythe to sever what is left. Our eyes would forever know suffering, only it would be bereft of meaning. No dreams would endure; all would be stagnation without the rite to degrade in rot and nourish the soil of a new bloom. What should we shape of ourselves and the pains that merit transformation without the blessing of the winding thread that connects us to generations beyond our passing? Hmm. No. I just don’t see-”
“No, you don’t see.” Harrow derided. Mockery & gloat were one in his guffaw and the oozing stream which came shortly after. “But I know. The soul – the shell of consciousness – can subsist without proxy. Vitality can be borrowed, repurposed, distributed to the noblest of minds who can court paradise from the darkness of our squandered earth.”
“& when Earth is bled? When there is no nourishment to be stolen from her marrow and the children who you would proscribe from knowing life & death. How shall these noble few make merry with the atrophy their deathless triumph has won?”
“I thought you a worldly man. One of virtue in his affinity for insight & invention. Alas, you mock the miracles – the science – which you refuse to understand.” Growled Harrow.
“Ah, here!” Dissonant glee aroused from Valdred. He presented a grayed sheet of parchment to this adamant defender of undeath, seated across the decanter table with eyes wider than the Gulf.
“Research notes?” Grumbled Harrow as he snatched the scrawl. His brows crumbled from their meteoric arch, crashing down to read the notes of mourning. Sunless loathing from those buried stars slithered from his face, which could fade to no less sallow hue. The flares of Hell’s radiance chased Valdred’s accusing eyes, shielded by the reddening glint of his scholar’s glasses.
“Reports of one who has eluded death. After the masquerade stunt, I asked a cohort to seek out light on one Aldred Harrow. In the seaside hovel that is Waldengrot, news was found. An obituary for your cousin. Read on, see what became of the man whose name you walk with. A little gravedigging. Poor fellow, so written off by the world, so uncounted and unloved, that days passed before his fall was discovered. His departure was barely a whisper, one his sorcerous kin did not even heed.”
Gruesome chuckles harried the cords of each, glaring at the other through miasmal huffs. Valdred sighed a murmur. “Should I even ask what you are?”
Harrow leashed the dusk beyond the window and the threads between the candles and sconces to his hand. Serrations of bone burst claws through his fingertips while his sign wove shadows to his wing. Gaunt was his smile and terrible in the wan sickness it wore with honor. “I am of Christ, arisen. A Lazarus of my own make, by blood. As I am of Eden’s bane. She perished, while I remain.”
The scorpion in Harrow’s glare lashed its venom. Rend your gut. Split your head. Commanded the basilisk’s eyes with a hex to break all cords of choice. A chimera’s hiss and the bite of its tail struck through the mind’s tender matter to rend all it could not bend to its poison. Gore yourself.
Valdred pinched his bifocals as he stooped to catch his tumbling cigar. The waxen sheen coveted his eyes prepared a mirror for the malevolent pair fixed upon him. The glassy lunes refracted the dusk-fiend’s gleaming intent.
For a flash, Harrow was transfixed by the disfigurement of his visage sprouting from the diamond shields. Lost to the lake of rotting image, unable to retrieve a soul from the sulfurous basin that gulped breath, the strigoi flailed against the skeletal likeness. Arden renounced the snare of reflection, bashing wings against the solar and flying for Val’s gullet with fanged rows.
Valdred’s stub died as cinders, yet the billows of verdant haze poured from the end of its burn. Lurching to relight it, he struck another with flint. Flaring wick and sparks spat another smoggy bundle. Murky censer bellowed odorous veil to shroud the fiend. The hellish gleam of the leech’s stare diminished in a sea of nymphs evoked from bilious fire.
In the rousing of churning brume, the doctor cast aside the apparent weariness of his age. His cane honed its tongue against the lunging carrion-beast. A click of powder and belligerent ignition funneled fury’s harpoon to catch the apparition before it sundered flesh for sumptuous possession. Bestial predation sang the woes of its maimed conceit. Marble orifices of the manor ran with the agony & humiliation of that sapient horror. Discordant gusts from the fiend’s split lungs thundered ruinous cords that whipped spite upon stone and quivering furnishing.
A crystalline void howled in the cavernous pits of Harrow’s center mass. Lanced through the chest, pinned to the back of the chair, the fiend’s wroth despair supplanted the wounds. Sulfurous brume poured where blood had been exiled. Writhing penumbras usurped his heart as the torso peeled off its encumbering sinew. Limbs tore his upper half from the splayed strands of flesh, like gum in the mouth of hell. Horrors from the deep wailed a choir through the wyrm’s channels while it crawled up from the seat it had been staked to. Ambling up with bulbous tentacles rasped from the wound it split, threads of perversion became the thing’s legs. Gnashing its maw and fibrous talons at his assailant, the vestiges of Harrow pounced through scoria & seeping gales.
Valdred spoke his prayer through the silver of his blade. His grin lacerated the shade, torrid saliva a gnat’s span from his carotid. The wyrm sailed on momentum, undeterred by a gash from the carver; a third eye gawked from the roaring jaw, glistening carmine at the capillaries it would slather in seconds. But the doctor’s faithful aegis lay not in that argent fang but the handheld crossbow in his left claw. Mechanized propulsion thrust the bolt from the little maw through the gorgon’s yawning cave. The thunderbolt from Valdred’s hand impaled where once stalactites lurched with grinding hunger. Another (deceptively fearsome) javelin launched in succession pierced the Infernal’s forehead. Affixed to the wall, the mutilated specter’s talons drooped limb with its arms. Erratic twitching from its effort to rebind its muscle and spur fresh thew yielded only feckless spasms; gasping for blood to burst its regeneration.
“Pre-Cambrian parasite, thou art.” Valdred spat; his acidic globule melted on the simmering floor of the solar. He reattached his arms to his cane, concealing the bow and lance, and downed his gin. Relighting his cigar, the doctor reveled in the broiling fumes through his cage. His breath rumbled with exultations, chiding the dismembered scourge with gravel in his throat and thorns in his palm. “Thou, least among the first of the pre-dawn vermin who refuse the earth and bleed her children. Thy kin burrow into rot to make hearths of our corpses. But no more for thee.”
Harrow’s hateful orbs pursued the offender of the skull they were lodged in. Coals of perdition, loathing fireflies, flickered ire from their gangrenous aurum. Staked to the stone in the temple and maw, the wriggling head squeezed the mercurial mist to stretch infantile legs from the changeling mass oozing from its disembodiment. But as one simmering pinion was plucked from the chasmal mouth a lethal ensign burned terror in its place.
Gloved hands and the mesh under his sleeve dared press the searing talisman through the severed gullet. “Behold, the sign of the Star!” Metal seethed to erupt pustules in the froth. The fetish evoked the ruling light of heaven, emulating that celestial body which all other regents of the welkin must orbit and obey. A mercurial sun-flare was born by the sweltering charm, bursting rays through the hanging skull.
On the floor where Harrow’s abandoned chair had been tossed down, tendrils from the separated legs protested the anguish his animating presence was now sundered by. Shorn of his roots, cut from his ardent materia, the profaning specter reeled in terror to be proscribed from the promised eternity it had only just dragged another down into. Riptides of radiance cleansed his essence, while the victor chaunted a liturgy as sullen as confident.
“By the winds over Gethsemane & the light on the crest of Golgotha, be banished! By the eyes of the sky and the resurrection of Osiris, be burnt! Get thee to ash. Back, to the abyss between the night stars thou prowl under. Seek no soul, yowling leech. All heaven is turned on thee. Hell & Tartarus find thee wanting. Be hunted by the shine of Eos and chased by Apollo’s chariot!”
Adjusting the incarnadine goggles settled on his aquiline nose, Valdred waived the murderous furies splintering from the fiend’s pupils. Halos of smoke enthroned the alchemist’s stony mien, consecrating his claim to the air over the fiery wisps that begged for a chance to gleam wrath from their slivers and coagulate once more for their vanquished host. "A soul is absent from thy carcass, famished for flesh to sate the pain of occupying a hearth in the pale inferno beyond the void. Hel & Hades are thy masters & betrayers. The father of the world and the mother of our sun bar thy name from their honored halls. Be bound to the flame, be thee engulfed in the jaw of the threshold between the stars. That forked thirst which becomes thee shall taste no spirits from us, we who abide in days and wane for their passing.”
Soft vespers trailed his solitary procession. That the rapacious carcass would roam no longer brought no great glee, but the old hymn offered some comfort at least. Valdred cleaved and salted the segments of the twice fallen thrall of night and brought them to the balcony. He toiled under the horns of draconic constellations, rearing their forms from the drapery as the remnants of tempest which’d doused it fled for the hills & far fens. The divided limbs were posed in a pentacle formation, then coated with emerald sap & caustic powder. Incense staved the pattern as the alchemical residue ignited. Plumes arose to bury the nether wind where flew the spirit’s mast. The smoldering ruin of the vampire banished the unquiet ghost to less than mist in the dew of dawn’s roust.