The Darkening Dream (20 page)

The boys swapped, pitching the boat enough to slosh water inside. Sam spun it around with the oars and steered them back up the coastline.

Sarah heard a horrible shriek from the shore.

“The vampire’s gone!” Anne said. “He just disappeared.”

Goosebumps rose on Sarah’s neck and back. She felt curiously in the moment. A funny thought popped into her head: Anne had used the word “vampire” without qualification.

“I think old ones might be able to turn into bats and fly,” Alex said. He’d hunched himself down in the boat, his eyes darting back and forth across the sky. “I don’t see him, but head out to sea as fast as you can. He won’t want to fly over deep water.”

Again the terrible shriek shattered the night air. Sarah imagined a giant bat with teeth like Charles soaring through the darkness.

Sam rowed out into the cove, his jaw set. The rest of them sat in silence, but Sarah counted Sam’s soft grunts, the watery splashes, the clunk of the oars in their locks. Above and behind them, she heard an occasional cry. But as they glided over bigger waves, the sound grew fainter.

After what seemed like hours, Sam beached the dinghy at the western point between the inlet and the Atlantic. He and Alex pulled it out of the water and dragged it up the sand.

As they trudged ashore, Sarah noticed her boots were filled with cold water.

Twenty:

Golden Compass

Salem, Massachusetts, Friday night, November 7, 1913

P
ARRIS WAITED WITH ONE
of the huge Moors on the vampire’s porch. He’d been told not to enter the house. But he was curious, even if the smell wafting from the open door didn’t exactly sell the place, reeking of charnel house gore and flesh left to rot.

He heard a leathery flapping accompanied by swirling currents of air.

“I see you met Ahmed,” the vampire said, suddenly beside him. The pastor nearly lost control of his bladder.

“What was out on the water?”

“No matter.” Mr. Nasir shrugged. “Let me introduce Fouad, my favorite.”

Parris startled again at the sight of a new Moor, shorter and older, his hair stark white against coffee-colored skin. His yellow teeth were filed into points.

Parris forced himself to be sociable. “Nice place you have here.”

“Are you in the market?” Mr. Nasir said. “I’m selling.”

Breathing through his mouth, Parris peered across the dilapidated porch at the boarded-over windows. He glanced back at the beach and the rolling surf.

“But it has such a lovely view.”

The vampire didn’t look. “I purchased by correspondence. The sales agent exaggerated its charms, and I despise basements below sea level.”

“He’s helping you find another?”

“He’s here now, inspecting the water table under the porch — six feet under.” Mr. Nasir drew back his lips in what passed for a smile. “Fouad hired a new agent.”

The pastor indicated his satchel. “Should we go inside?”

“Only the dead are welcome in my home.”

The vampire barked at the older Negro in a language Parris didn’t know. Fouad was gone in an instant and soon returned with an end table under his right arm and a small golden box studded with rubies and emeralds in his right hand. He placed the table in the darkest corner of the porch but held onto the box.

The pastor opened his bag and assembled his things. He jumped back when he found a cockroach scurrying over the wooden surface. Ahmed stepped forward, snatched up the insect, and popped it in his mouth. Parris tried to ignore the crunching sound.

“I’ll need the piece of Gabriel’s Horn.”

Fouad handed the pastor the small box.

He held his breath as he opened it. Inside, nestled in velvet, was a fragment of beaten gold, perhaps an inch long, half coated in white wax.

Mr. Nasir backed away.

“Too holy for you?” Parris asked.

The vampire shrugged. “The archangel may have recited the Koran to the false prophet Muhammad, cursed be his name, but we are no longer on good terms.”

Good to know. Nasir hadn’t seemed in the least disturbed by the cross on the church wall.

Parris indicated the device he’d brought with him, now sitting on the tabletop. Also made of solid gold, it looked like a miniature water well.

“I had a jeweler craft this. Between the gold and the rush job, it cost me over four hundred dollars.”

The undead waved his hand. “Sell that jeweled box if you like. I suspect this won’t be our last expense.”

At least the vampire wasn’t stingy. The gems alone were easily worth two thousand.

Parris was almost finished. He used a pair of tweezers to wind some silver cord around the vampire’s waxy fragment then suspended it from the arch of gold spanning the bowl of his device. He lit five white candles.

For a moment, the pastor feared he’d forgotten his knife. Judging by what he’d seen, he worried that any he might borrow would give him gangrene. But he found the blade at the bottom of his bag, half embedded in the loaf of bread.

“Before I begin,” he said, “will the sight of blood cause you any… distress?”

Mr. Nasir’s laugh was worse than his smile. “Good you ask, but I can control myself.”

“Very well. Please stay back at least six feet, and do not interrupt or speak during the ritual.”

The vampire and the three Moors retreated to the edge of the porch.

Parris steeled himself, crumbled some of the bread about the table, then sprinkled the crumbs with salt. He wrapped more silver cord around one wrist, cutting off the circulation to his hand, and chanted:

Bound and Binding. Binding, Bound.

See the sight. Hear the sound.

What was lost. Now is found.

Bound and Binding. Binding, Bound.

Parris felt the familiar tingling elation, like standing after kneeling for hours in prayer. He sliced into his bound palm and loosened the silver cord around his hand. As blood returned to it, so too did bright pain. Parris directed the flow of syrupy fluid over the artifact and into the bowl of the device. When it was full, he wrapped his hand in clean linen.

“It’s done,” he said.

The vampire peered at the device from his position. “That looked easy.”

“It wasn’t,” Parris said, exhausted and lightheaded.

He was pleased to see the dangling gold fragment had spun on its silver cord to point west. He picked up the makeshift compass and rotated it. The pointer remained locked.

“Interesting,” Mr. Nasir said. “It points at the Horn?”

“It should.”

“And to think my Egyptian colleague has spent the better part of five centuries looking for the thing.”

“If the Horn is in town, it shouldn’t take long to find,” Parris said.

“New ventures are best begun early in the evening.” The vampire cocked his head. “Keep the compass until tomorrow night.”

Parris packed his things and wrapped the device, carrying it separately. His spell preserved the liquid from evaporation but not spillage. It required a subtle command of the humors. Betty had taught him a lot about the humors, particularly blood.

Twenty-One:

Egyptian Mythology

Salem, Massachusetts, Saturday, November 8, 1913

T
IRED… SO TIRED.
T
HE
evening had left Sarah feeling like someone had beaten her over the head with a baseball bat wrapped in pillows.

She dreamt of the principal’s office. It was nighttime, and the room was lit by a pair of torches mounted on the wall alongside school photos. Mr. Burnsworth, the principal, and Mrs. Fletcher, her English teacher, knelt on the floor. They both wore nun’s habits, the Catholic kind with the black and white cowls.

Sarah lay before them wearing only a coarse linen shift. It was bunched under her armpits, tight across her tender breasts. Her pregnant belly was swollen to bursting, her legs were bare, her lower half naked and exposed.

A hideous long cramp surged through her abdomen. She screamed, but the voice didn’t sound like her own.

“Quiet, bitch,” Mr. Burnsworth said. “You’ll wake the whole school.”

Mrs. Fletcher leaned forward and wiped her brow. “Isabella, the baby’s head!”

Isabella? Sarah looked down again. Long red braids tumbled over her shoulders. Her skin was fair and freckled, fairer than her own had ever been. On her dress, bunched as it was, she saw an embroidered doe.

The girl from the Charles dream.

As if in answer, a feminine voice echoed inside her head.
We’re bound by blood and death, you and I. Blood and death
.
The Strength of God sings in our blood. The horn sounds our sacrifice, time and death mean nothing in the face of that.

Sarah screamed again as the wave of pain crested. Hot fire burned between her legs. She sat forward to see around her distended tummy. The pain redoubled.

The door to the room rattled and shook. Faculty photos were knocked askew.

He comes,
Isabella’s voice said inside her head.
We must both die twice before we save each other.

The wooden door exploded, swept open, and crushed Mrs. Fletcher against the case of sporting trophies. Sarah heard her bones crunch.

A monstrous bat filled the threshold. Man-sized, he glared with beady eyes dark as pitch. He entered slowly, long arms joined to his gray body by scabrous drapes of flesh. A horrible stench rolled into the room, the smell of rot mixed with spices and honey.

Meet the one you hunt.

The bat roared, revealing thousands of murderous teeth. The flexion of his ribcage forced his hideous wings into a parody of bird-like movement. His arm blurred and he slapped Mr. Burnsworth, whose head bounced off the wall and whose decapitated body crumpled to the ground.

Sarah squirmed on the floor, eyes wide, streams of the principal’s blood running down her face. Her ichor-streaked bare legs found no purchase on the slick linoleum.

The bat-creature bent down, extended one clawed finger, and sliced her from groin to sternum. Pain beyond imagining. White heat. Red blood. He peeled back layers of meat and skin. She felt hideous tugging and his dead hands brought forth the tiny infant, crowned in gore. Almost tenderly, he severed the cord and gave the babe a squeeze.

My first killer, and yours
.
As fearsome as he is, he serves another.

The child wailed.

Her strength fading, Sarah reached out for the baby, but the monster set him out of reach.

My death, your blood, your death, my blood. I save you and you save me.
Together we can stop them, but the price will be steep.

With his razor fangs, the monster bit into his own fingers, twisted the other hand into Sarah’s raw guts to make her scream, and shoved his bloody digits into her mouth.

The dark gift
. Together Isabella and Sarah gagged on the taste: exotic, meaty, salty, perfumed. The sound of the horn, slow and mournful, filled the room.

Sarah woke in her bed. She felt slick and wet below. Kicking off the covers she found her nightgown stained with blood.