The Monster Man of Horror House (34 page)

“Do
not kill us,” the girl now repeated. This time she spoke so clearly and so
precisely that I was left in no doubt as to her will. “Do not hurt us or anyone
else here; the Matron, the orderlies or no one. You are not to hurt anyone you
see around here. Anyone. Do you understand?”

I
understood the remit if not the logic, but that was neither here nor there. The
girl with the bandages had decreed it and so that was good enough for me; I would
not hurt anyone else while inside this building so I barked again to
demonstrate my submission.

I
might’ve stayed there standing on one leg and woofing deferentially all night had
another voice, just as loud as the girl in the bandages’, not demanded to know
what I was doing.

“Don’t
just stand there you mangy mutt; kill them! Kill them all!”

x

Rachel’s directive was every bit as compelling as the girl in the bandages’ but
it was diametrically opposed to what I’d already been commanded to do, causing me
confusion. Rachel bawled at me louder still, appearing in the hallway behind me
and shoving me in the back towards the pups.

“Do
it! Tear them to pieces! Do it I say!”

I
wasn’t strong enough to defy such an authority so I lurch forward to do as she
said, but the girl in the bandages threw up her hands and ordered me to halt.

“No,
don’t do it! Stop! Stop there!” she pleaded, blocking my path and wrong-footing
me with uncertainty.

Rachel
refused to let it lie though.

“Go
on, you’re supposed to be a killer you mangy mutt, so prove it, kill them all!”

I
barked at my mistresses to make up their minds and the girl in the bandages
pressed home my indecision. “Don’t do as she says. She’s being horrible to you.
Do only as I say and do not hurt anyone.”

Remarkably,
up until this moment, Rachel hadn’t even noticed the girl in the bandages,
probably because my immense frame was sandwiched in the doorway between them
but she noticed her now all right and was thunderstruck at her audacity.

“You
bitch! You thieving little bitch! You took that from me and now you think you
can take him too? I’ll kill you myself, you bitch!” Rachel screamed, launching
herself past me and bang-smack into the little girl. They smashed into a chest
of drawers that quickly splintered to matchwood and rolled around the room
scattering pups and beds in their wake. The girl in the bandages did
brilliantly well to hold Rachel off for as long as she did, but Rachel’s
experience soon began to tell and blood and hair started flying in all
directions.

“Help!
Please help me!” the girl called to me, now in pain as well as fear.

Rachel
shouted at me to keep out of it and told me to “kill the others” if I wanted to
do something useful, but I could stay on the sidelines no longer. The girl in
the bandages’ authority may have been less sure of itself, but her pleas shone far
truer than Rachel’s lie-infested commands, so much so that even in my savage
state I could tell when I was being used. And if there’s one thing an unstoppable
forces of supernature like me likes less than being called a mangy mutt, it’s
being duped into doing someone else’s bidding for them.
 

I
spun away from the pups and roared at the girls fighting on the ground to get
their attention. Rachel and the girl in bandages looked up at me in surprise
but my fury knew no bounds.

“I
command you to…” Rachel got as far as ordering before I swiped her into the
wall with a single swing of the paw.

Rachel
crashed right through the wall and into the next dorm and I was already after
her, roaring and hurling myself through the ragged hole as she leapt to her
feet to greet me. I charged right through her, bowling her over with bulk and
claws, only to receive several large gouges across my shoulder for my troubles.
Before I could turn to protect myself Rachel came after me, swiping and biting
as she tried to find my throat, but I had speed as well as strength on my side and
bolted through the next wall without so much as missing a stride. I tumbled
onto my back to try to catch her with an outstretched talon, but Rachel skated
across the ceiling to avoid my grasps and dropped on me from above, her fangs on
a direct course for my Adam’s apple. Luckily Rachel never made it that far
south; before she got within three feet of me, I swung a lucky foot at her and drop-kicked
her through the closed door and into the corridor beyond.

A
trio of firearms officers who’d been called to subdue a rabid dog now looked
through the hole in the door in disbelief and began blasting away at me without
even asking if I had rabies or not. I charged through their hail of lead and jumped
into the oily vampirene in their midst, scattering the four cops to four
corners as me and my ward went on slugging it out around the orphanage.

The
police continued to pepper me with their Smith & Wessons and I lost count
of the number of bullets that found their way into my back, but Rachel wasn’t
pestered by a single shot suggesting looks counted for everything with these bozos,
so I flung a chest of drawers at nearest copper and knocked him clean out of
the window and into the rose bushes below.

“We
need back-up! Everyone you can get! Bring all the guns in the world!” I heard a
policeman crying into his radio as he and his remaining colleague emptied and
reloaded their handguns into me until they were all out of luck. Unfortunately
for them, they made not the slightest bit of headway with me. Rachel was my
entire focus and I chased her from room to room, swiping down ceiling panels,
strip lights, cables and pipes as we took our fight on a whirlwind tour of the care
home until smoke and dust filled every room.

At
last the police gave up trying to kill me and concerned themselves instead with
evacuating the kids. They ran them in a line down the stairs as if this was a
fire drill and Rachel was apoplectic to see the children slipping from her
grasp once again.

“Nooo,
they have to die!” she screamed, breaking off from the fight to race towards
one of the stragglers. She was too quick for me, but the girl in the bandages
appeared from out of nowhere, grabbed Rachel by the ankle and swung her full
circle and back into my loving arms.

“Take
her. Take her and go!” she told me, so grasped her as tightly as I could,
clenching my hand around her tiny throat and charging through the mayhem, out
of a recently boarded up window and into the night below. I ran as fast and as
far as I could, dragging the wriggly Rachel with me through the park and then
the woods, but it was taxing keeping a hold of her as she was free to rake me
at will with her savage nails. All I could do to distract her was to slam her
headfirst through every tree and fence post I came to until after three miles
of destruction Rachel agreed to a truce.

“All
right, all right, you’ve made your point!” she protested as I ran her north
through farmland and woods and back to the sanctuary of our basement. “I’ll not
harm the brats again. I’ll leave them be, just let me go, you mutt.”

But
I didn’t let her go, not for another forty miles. Not until the approaching
dawn had barred her from returning to Colchester. I’d been charged by the girl in
the bandages to do this much and I had no choice but to obey.
 

I
managed to steer a path back through Essex, Suffolk and back into Norfolk
without running into too many humans along the way, just the odd startled
motorist who’d never be believed by anyone and who’d spend the rest of his life
trying to rationalise what he’d seen, before I finally released my stranglehold
on Rachel once we were on the outskirts of Thetford.

It
had taken most of the night but we were almost home.

Rachel
brushed the splinters and twigs from her hair as I looked on and huffed.
Neither of us had the time nor the inclination to continue this squabble as the
sun was rising in the east and we had maybe only an hour at best before we were
transformed once more, me into a man, Rachel into a pile of dust, so we put our
differences to one side and made plans to return to the basement.

Beyond
this last stretch of heathland lay a couple of smallholdings and the occasional
cattery before the varicose veins of suburbia reached out towards the sticks.
Mine was one of the most outer-lying houses on the estate (deliberately so) but
it was still going to represent something of a minor miracle sneaking home in
my present state. See, my hungers had returned with the discharge of my duties,
but fortunately for my neighbours, so had Rachel’s sway over me and she
couldn’t allow me to run amok this close to her resting place, so she brought
me to heel with a few choice words.

“You
fucking dick! Why did you take that bitch’s side and not mine? You ruined
everything, you did! You ruined the whole night! You should’ve ripped them all to
pieces like I told you to. I’m your friend, remember? Not some milk-sucking
little brat barely out of her mother’s cunny, who wouldn’t even be walking
around if it wasn’t for me! That was your fault, that was, making me leave her
last week. You’re a coward, John Coal. A dirty stinking lily-livered coward!”

I
shrugged these observations off with a ripple of my coat. Names could never harm
me; neither could sticks, stones, knives or bullets come to that and as if to
prove the point some of the slugs I’d collected over the previous evening fell
from my back as I waggled my mane.

“Arsehole!”
Rachel fumed, biting her lips and chewing her anger as she brooded over what
might have been. She looked to the stars above and then at the pink clouds drifting
along the horizon and just shook her head. The best laid plans of mice, men and
murderesses. Some things just weren’t meant to be.

“Ohhh,
come on, let’s go home,” she eventually sighed, taking me by the claw and leading
me back through the grasses and back to our unfinished
Game of Dracula
.

xi

Obviously my memories of the previous evening were sketchy at best, but they
came back to me in dribs and drabs, like flashes of a horrible dream, so that
by the early evening I could more or less account for most of the five dozen
gouges I found across my arms and neck after I came to with my head in the
toilet the next day.

“What
the hell?”

Rachel
tried to deny all knowledge of the incident at first, but confronted with the
numerous radio reports of a wild dog loose in Colchester and my own explicit
recollections from within the care home she finally admitted her part.

“I
didn’t want to do it, you made me do it,” she insisted. “I was just
showing you how I felt
.”

Hmm,
my own words used against me. I had to hand it to Rachel, she really knew how
to stew.

“See,
I can’t control myself any more than you can in those circumstances,” she
continued. “That’s why I came to you for help, if you remember. Now are you
going to help me or what? Or are you going to be like all those other selfish
pricks I’ve ever known and run out on me?”

Poor
old Rachel, she was such a long way from shore – even for a messed-up
psycho vampire bitch – that she didn’t even know which way to swim. I know
it sounds bizarre after all she’d put me through but I still felt genuinely
sorry for her. And I knew I was the only person who could help her overcome her
‘episodes’. After all, I at least was another supernatural being. What man
could ever reach out or understand her as I could? And vice versa for that
matter. I knew I had to continue with her therapy, even if it killed me. I was
all she had. And by that same token, I was all the orphanage had too –
much as I’m sure they’d be delighted to hear.

“You’re
right Rachel. You’re right. I finally understand how hard this must have been
for you,” I told her, looking at the clock on the basement wall by the stairs.
“But listen, I’m going to change again tonight, in a little under six hours, so
let me do it here, okay? Let’s give the kids a night off tonight shall we?”

Rachel’s
hackles retracted when she saw that was the extent of her telling off and she agreed
to play the game tonight. I didn’t doubt it for a second, as fun and games were
her little distraction, so when she returned to her coffin to rest up for the
evening I jumped on the lid and screwed it down with six silver screws I’d
forged from a solid silver crucifix Lincoln Cathedral had generously, if
unwittingly, donated towards Rachel’s rehabilitation.

“What
are you doing? Let me out of here you mutt! How have you done this? Let me out!
Let me out now!” she demanded, lashing out and kicking against the lid of her
casket from the inside, but as formidable as she was, even Rachel lacked the power
to escape her own grave, particularly when held there by the strength of the Almighty.
“Undo me! Undo me this instant!”

“I’ll
undo you, alright,” I promised her. “But I can’t do it in an instant. It’s
going to take rather longer than that. Have patience. But I will undo you. Eventually.
You – and all you’ve become.”

I
opened the book I’d brought with me, pulled up a chair and began to read.

“
All children, except for one, grow up. They
soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew this was this...
”