Alchemy, Book Two of the Mercian Trilogy (21 page)

Eloise was wide-eyed as she said, “And the family that lived here …”

“Was my family. I have to allow for the possibility that Wyndham’s determination to destroy me is as much personal as a simple fight between good and evil.”

“Oh, I’d say it’s personal,” said Marcus. “He told me that destroying you was his life’s work.” He turned to Eloise and said, “That’s not normal, is it, talking like that?”

Eloise laughed and said, “No, I don’t suppose it is.” She looked at Will then, her expression full of meaning as she said, “Should we tell Marcus about our progress so far, what we’ve learned, or is it best he doesn’t know?”

Will had no doubt that Marcus could be trusted – he was as sure of it as he was unsure of Chris and Rachel – and if anything, he suspected the more Marcus knew the more he would be wedded to their cause.

“Yes, tell him everything. I’m just going to look in the crypt.”

“Do you want me to …?”

“No, I’m looking out of curiosity, nothing more. You tell Marcus our story.”

Will started down the steps as Eloise began by saying,
“You know Will was born in 1240, right?”

The gentle murmur of her voice escorted him through the gate at the bottom of the steps, into the small crypt, more fitting than the chapel above for the family it was built to serve. Another room opened off it, housing slightly less ornate tombs, and beyond that, an ossuary, the door to which was locked.

He opened it and stepped inside. It was a small room, but the bones were piled high, skulls filling every wall from floor to ceiling, with other bones slotted in between as if to complete the decorative effect. Will couldn’t understand where these bones had come from.

There was no churchyard nearby from which they would have needed to be removed. Nor had the land this house occupied been a burial ground. Will thought back to his youthful memories of Marland and was certain this area had been meadows back then.

He moved about the room, and saw now that many of the skulls were damaged, possibly broken as they were excavated, but equally possibly suggesting death in combat. He wondered if these bones had been found in the ground during the building work, the remains of some much more ancient burial site.

He stepped outside and locked the door again, then walked slowly around the two rooms of the crypt, feeling the walls, listening to the sounds of his own steps
on the floor, trying to get a sense of whether some other chamber was hidden here, but finding nothing.

When he came back up into the chapel, Eloise stopped talking and looked at him, her expression asking if everything was OK. Will smiled and said, “There’s a small room at the back of the crypt that’s locked – it would be a convenient place for me to hide during daylight hours if I need to.”

“So you won’t go back to the new house?”

“Yes, but perhaps not today.” He looked at Marcus and said, “How much of our story is left to tell?”

“Eloise just told me about Asmund – Wyndham never mentioned anything about that, not to me. I don’t think he mentioned Lorcan …?”

“Labraid,” said Eloise.

“Yeah, I don’t think he’s mentioned him.”

Will said, “Unfortunately the trail has gone cold since I killed Asmund. We came here, and judging by Wyndham’s efforts to thwart us, we’ve come to the right place, but in truth he would be as well served in leaving us alone because we have no idea where to turn next and no one to tell us.”

“What do you mean, no one to tell you?”

Will looked at Eloise, but she said, “No, you tell him the last of it.”

“Asmund has a master, and that master himself serves
Lorcan Labraid. Though I had never met another of my kind until I met Asmund, it seems others like me have gone to great lengths to protect me and ensure my comfort all these centuries. Yet now, when I need guidance most, none of them is to be seen.”

Marcus laughed, loud enough that Eloise looked concerned, fearing the heavy chapel door might not contain that much noise. He jumped up from the pew then, unable to restrain himself, and stood on the altar step along from where Eloise sat.

“You know why they haven’t shown themselves? Wyndham!”

“I don’t understand. What has he done that would …”

“He’s caught them – a few of them anyway.”

“Caught?” Eloise said, standing up too.

“Caught! He’s got them locked up in his cellars. I saw two of them, no three, and one of them talks all the time about you, telling him where you are, stuff like that.”

Will and Eloise looked at each other. If she saw the implication of that last comment, she didn’t let on. But Will realised he might have done Chris and Rachel a terrible injustice in not trusting them. If a captive vampire was giving Wyndham information, he hardly needed Chris to do the same.

“So Wyndham will know I’m here now.”

“Not for sure – this vampire’s half crazy because of
the stuff he does to them, because they don’t get any blood. I guarantee right now it’s shouting ‘Marland’ again and again. That’s what it does.”

“Then what hope have we if Asmund’s master is half-crazed?”

Marcus shook his head. “I doubt that one’s Asmund’s master. There’s another one, but he keeps it in a separate room and he wouldn’t let me see it – said it was too dangerous.”

Will said, “It?”

“Wyndham often calls them it, like they’re animals, and some of them don’t look human. Not you though; he always refers to you as he. So yeah, he wouldn’t let me see it, said it was best I didn’t.” He looked from Will to Eloise and back again. “Well, what do you reckon? Maybe the one that’s hidden away is the one you’re looking for, and that’s why no one’s paid you a visit.”

Will’s thoughts were reeling. His destiny had not been hidden from him or made difficult on purpose. It was Wyndham at every turn, determined to stop him, to destroy him or keep him locked within this eternal torment.

It raised another question though. All along Wyndham had acted as if he feared an encounter with Will himself, always sending spirits and demons, turning nature against him, trying to kill Eloise, yet apparently he had
no fear of vampires at all. If he had imprisoned Asmund’s master, it seemed unlikely he would be fearful of Will.

“I don’t understand,” said Will. “If Wyndham has captured other vampires, why does he not engage me in direct combat? Why all these sorcerer’s tricks, why attack Eloise, when he has it within his power to fight and triumph over my kind?”

“Because you’re not just another vampire,” said Eloise. “You’re William of Mercia and Lorcan Labraid calls to you, not to anyone else, to you. Think about it. You shouldn’t have been able to defeat Asmund – he was bigger than you and stronger – but you killed him. Wyndham isn’t afraid of vampires, he’s afraid of you.”

“She’s right,” said Marcus.

Will wasn’t convinced, but there was no question. If Wyndham had imprisoned vampires, they had to find where he lived, to take the battle to him at last, to give him something to fear.

“We have to find out where his house is.”

“That’s easy,” said Marcus. “I know where it is.”

“You said the windows of the car were blacked out.”

“But I saw the house, and I know how far we drove, and I’ve lived around here my whole life. It’s a mansion in the country on the other side of the city – I recognised it right away, saw it from the school bus once when we were on a trip.”

Will nodded, imagining this house. His mind flew, away across the city with the cathedral spire standing proud, back out into the darkness with the snow falling in heavy flakes, seeing a house, perhaps as large as this, a house holding a secret. That secret, he thought, was not imprisoned vampires, but Wyndham’s fear. He feared William of Mercia, and now Will was determined he would give him something to base that fear upon.

T
o my great frustration, and though I encountered his victims often enough, I failed to find William of Mercia. I knew from my mother’s description that he was a boy, and I had some idea of what he looked like, but he eluded me. I sought his lair too, but all of my powers, all of the dark arts at my disposal, failed to reveal its location to me
.

When the victims stopped appearing, for a month, three months, six, I began to fear he’d gone into hibernation, denying me for decades more. And each time a new victim appeared, I rejoiced that he was active again, knowing also that I had gained so much new knowledge while he’d slept
.

One thing I had realised early on was that it was not enough for me to kill vampires because there would always be more. To destroy the evil they represented I had to understand them, and to do that I had to capture and study them
.

William of Mercia may have eluded me, but over
the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries I caught many of his kind. Some were from the wider area surrounding this city, for this seems a region particularly plagued by them, and others from across these islands
.

I learned many hard lessons in those early days. I learned, for example, that the best way of transporting them was in a sealed box during the daytime – after all, why would they wish to escape into the agony of sunlight?

Equally, and almost to my great cost, I learned that as well as superhuman strength, they were possessed of the ability to open locks with the use of their minds alone. After much trial and error, I developed an ingenious system in which chains held their cages shut, but the chains fed through the floor and were locked in another room
.

The bars and chains were made from a particularly strong alloy of my own design, but as knowledge of electricity developed in the early nineteenth century, I soon learned that I could run a current through the metal, strong enough to convince the captives that it was better not to touch the bars
.

I won’t dispute that some of the experiments I’ve carried out on these demons have not been pleasant. How else was I to learn how they lived and how they
died? Fire and sunlight I soon discovered would make them plead for death, but would not kill them. Fire and light, I also learned, would make them talk
.

Yet much of what I learned early on was gained without resorting to such methods. The second vampire I caught, in 1842, was unearthed in the south-west of England, a gentlemanly creature who insisted on being known only as Baal. A scholar in his first youth, he considered it amusing to be known now by the name of one of the Princes of Hell, for that is what he believed he’d become
.

He still had the look of a young student with dreams of following in the footsteps of the late Lord Byron, yet Baal had actually been alive since the time of Chaucer. Born in 1360, he’d been lucky enough to be taken under the tutelage of the vampire who’d infected him. It speaks of both Baal’s sense of honour and his ruthlessness that he’d killed his master as soon as he’d learned everything the latter could impart
.

It was Baal who told me that they only fed on those who did not carry the vampire bloodline, and even then only on those who were fit and healthy. It was the life force they were taking from their victims, spiritual nourishment rather than food, and the life remaining within a body determined how long it would be before they needed blood again
.

Garlic, he told me, was not repugnant to them, but confused their otherwise extraordinary senses, making it impossible to judge the blood of potential victims. The crucifix meant nothing to them, and Baal, a committed and penitent believer himself, reasoned this was because his condition predated the arrival of Christianity
.

Daylight and fire were like the agonies of Hell, and a stake through the heart would weaken them to the extent of helplessness, but Baal also confirmed that I had quite accidentally chanced upon the only certain way of killing a vampire – the removal of its head
.

Of course, I did not entirely take Baal’s word for all these things and carried out experiments over the following decades to test the truth of them. He was never the subject of these himself, and I must admit that for all the evil he carried within him, I respected him, even liked him
.

In 1861, desperate for blood, he begged me to end his life. He had been reading almost continuously for months before this, the Bible most often of all, even though I tried to discourage him from a book which I’ve never found of worth
.

I agreed, albeit with a sad heart, and before the end I asked if he would at last tell me his real name
.

“I cannot use it,” he said. “It would bring shame on the good people who gave it to me.” I nodded and
he said, “I’m ready,” and closed his eyes
.

Another demon in an adjoining cage had never seen his own kind’s death, and the sight of Baal disappearing so completely filled him with such horror that he began to babble. How ironic that it was an act of mercy on my part that should lead to the greatest leap in my knowledge
.

It still took the application of bright lights to get the facts reasonably straight, but it was this creature that told me of Lorcan Labraid, a demon it laughably described as the overlord of all vampires, a vampire king. Even under extreme torture, it claimed not to know the whereabouts of this greater demon, but it did admit to knowing where I could find Labraid’s servant, the demon that did his bidding. Was this William of Mercia, I asked, because I had heard the name by now and reasoned it was the one I sought
.

“William of Mercia?” The creature laughed through its pain. “It’s not for the likes of me to know about William of Mercia. But the vampire I speak of is more powerful than anything you’ll have yet encountered.”

This was intriguing, but once again I couldn’t persuade it to talk further on the subject, even when I threatened to remove its head, a threat I eventually carried out. In the face of such obstinacy or ignorance, the only inference I could take was that even the vampire
king, Lorcan Labraid, waited on William of Mercia
.

I had neither of them, but I had precise information on the whereabouts of Labraid’s loyal lieutenant. The location was close by, deep beneath a mausoleum in one of the city’s oldest cemeteries. If it had not been for the information I’d received, I would not have believed the mausoleum to contain any hidden passages and I certainly could not find the entrance
.