Vampire Seeker (5 page)

“You said you were on a train, what train?” he asked, and this seemed to interest him somehow.

“A train back home in London,” I said. Now that wasn’t a lie.

“A steam train?” Harry asked.

“You got it,” I said back. This was a lie, but how could I explain we had electric trains which ran beneath the
ground? Did they even have electricity in 1888? My history was as bad as my math.

“That still doesn’t explain how you have ended up on the other side of the world,” Louise said, the fire
crackling behind her.

“Like I’ve already told you, I don’t know how I got to be here either,” I replied. “Maybe one
day I’ll remember – figure it out – because if I do, then maybe I can go home, back to…” I was just
about to say 2012, when I stopped myself and said, “London.”

“It doesn’t add up,” Harry said, glancing at the preacher, his guns still aimed at me.

“The preacher said that I had been hit hard on the head,” I reminded them. “Perhaps I’m suffering
from amnesia.”

“What’s that?” Zoe cut in.

“Loss of memory,” I explained. “But one thing I am sure of is that I’m no vampire or whatever it is
you call them.”

Slowly, the preacher lowered his guns, but didn’t holster them. “You said that you were interested in vampires.
Why?” he asked me, from beneath that white moustache.

“Why not?” I shot back. “You seem to be more than interested in them yourselves.”

“They’ve killed here, just like you say they have in your London,” he explained. “We hunt them.”

“Like bounty hunters, you mean?” thinking of the westerns I’d seen as a kid on T.V.

“Not like bounty hunters,” Harry cut in, his eyes glinting like two chinks of grey flint. “We’re more
than that.”

“So you all have jobs then?” I asked, trying not to sound flippant, but there was a part of me that still wondered
if this was all really happening. Maybe I would wake up at any moment, going round and round on that tube train until the
cops found me and woke me up.

“We can be hired from time to time,” Harry said.

“For what?”

“This and that,” Zoe answered.

“Protection,” the preacher said, and now he did holster his guns, suggesting he believed my story and no longer
suspected me of being a threat to him and his friends. Unlike him, the others persisted in aiming their guns at me.

“Protection from what?” I asked him, putting my own guns away and sitting back down before the fire.

“The vampires,” the preacher said, taking up his plate again and forking beans into his mouth. “We’ve
killed some of them, but there are plenty of them left, hiding in mines and caves in the mountains.

“So people believe vampires exist here?” I asked him, knowing that back home, people didn’t really believe
in such things.

“No, not all of them,” Harry answered for the preacher, his guns still drawn. “That’s the problem.
People are blind to what they don’t believe in. That’s how the vampires have gotten away with their killing for
so long.”

I thought of the killer from home – my home in 2012 – and knew that they would never catch the killer because
they didn’t believe. They were looking for a man – not a monster. Although it pained me to admit that Harry was
right, he was bang-on. The police back home laughed at the idea of a vampire committing the killings and that’s why
he would continue to slip through their fingers. They couldn’t see what they didn’t believe in.

“So why do you believe?” I asked Harry, as the preacher gestured to him and the others to lower their guns.

Taking his place back around the fire, Harry said, “We believe because we’ve all lost someone to those creatures.
We’ve seen what they can do. We’ve seen what happened to those we cared about – we saw what they became.”

“What about you?” Louise asked me, scrapping the remains of her food from the plate and into the fire. The flames
hissed and spat.

“What about me?” I said.

“Why do you believe in vampires?”

I sat thoughtfully for a moment, not knowing what to say. Where had my interest – my unwavering belief that vampires
existed – come from? It had always been there – but why? Looking at Louise’s pretty face through the flames,
I said, “I don’t know.”

“Something else you’ve forgotten?” Harry muttered.

“Perhaps,” I whispered.

An uncomfortable silence fell over us and I sat and wondered if they truly believed what I had said or not. But did it really
matter? They were all probably a part of my subconscious as I lay unconscious on the floor of that tube train, waiting for
the police to find me. But would I be able to create something so real? The smell of the food, the taste of those chilli beans
– it all felt so real. Would my subconscious be able to conjure up all that stuff? And why the old west and the year
1888? If I were unconscious back in London of 2012 – why would I have dreamt something like this up? Why dream about
a cowboy with attitude, two pretty cowgirls with guns, and a preacher who perhaps wasn’t even a preacher? I had no interest
in the old west. But if it was all real, if this wasn’t a nightmare I was creating on the floor of that tube train –
why was I here?

With the sound of the fire burning before us, the preacher poked at it with a twig, and looking through the flames at me,
he said, “Tell me about the man on the train – this Jack the Ripper.”

I had studied the Ripper case – what student criminologist hadn’t? Some of them had been so obsessed by the case
it had become their life’s work, calling themselves Ripperologists. Why? He was the first recorded serial killer and
all criminologists wanted to study one of them. And the fact that Jack had never been caught just added fuel to the flames
of the conspiracy theories which had been created. To truly discover the identity of Jack the Ripper was the Holy Grail of
criminology.

But how did I answer the preacher’s question? He was asking me about the guy – the one I suspected of being a
vampire – from 2012, not the infamous Ripper who had stalked the backstreets of Whitechapel in the London of 1888. The
guy on the tube train wasn’t the Ripper, he was someone completely different. But it was him that the preacher wanted
to know about, because I was connected to him – he was the person who had sent me here.

They sat silently, looking at me through the flames, waiting for me to talk. It had turned cold, and I pulled the long brown
coat that I was wearing tight about me. The sky was like a sheet of black glass that had been sprinkled with silver glitter.
Apart from the sound of the wood snapping in the fire before me, the only other noise I could hear was the neighing of their
horses.

The preacher took two more of those hand-rolled cigarettes from the box and lit both of them. One he stuck in the corner of
his mouth, and the other he passed to me. I took a puff, careful not to draw too heavily on it. I didn’t want another
coughing fit. With a wisp of grey smoke curling up from the corner of my mouth, I looked at the group huddled around the fire
and said, “Jack the Ripper is responsible for the deaths of five women. He was called other names like ‘Leather
Apron’ and ‘The Whitechapel Murderer’, but it was the ‘Ripper’ name that stuck.”

“Why Ripper?” the preacher asked, the end of his cigarette winking on and off in the dark.

“He ripped open his victims’ throats, stomachs, removed their internal organs, and mutilated their faces and genitals,”
I told them.

“So this is the vampire that you were following?” Harry asked, his eyes fixed on me, as if studying my every movement.
“They called this vampire
Jack the Ripper
where you come from?”

I wanted to tell him no, that it wasn’t the Ripper, but how did I explain? How did I explain I was chasing after someone
who the press had referred to as a ‘Jack the Ripper copycat killer’, that it was only me who suspected him of
being a vampire? If I told them the truth, Harry and his friends would be facing off with me again, suspecting me of being
a vampire, too. But did it really matter what I told them? They weren’t real – none of this was. The only reason
I was sitting here discussing Jack the Ripper was because my unconscious mind was scrambling through all the information in
my head. A bit like going to sleep and dreaming about all the stuff you had done the previous day. The whole “Ripper”
thing had been on my mind before I’d been strangled on that train, so it was reasonable, then, that my mind would be
trying to make sense of it all. I would wake up any time now; those armed cops would be working on me, reviving me, blowing
air into my lungs, pounding on my chest to give me a kick start. I was going to wake up at any moment.

So drawing on the cigarette again, I looked at Harry and said, “Yes, it was Jack the Ripper I was chasing. It was him
who, I guess, brought me here.”

“Why here?” Zoe asked, her eyes wide.

“Maybe he was close to being captured in London,” Louise said thoughtfully. Then, turning to look at me she added,
“You were chasing him, right? You caught up with him – you saw him – you could recognise him…”

“I never saw his face,” I cut in. “He came at me from behind.”

“That would explain why he didn’t kill you like the others,” Zoe added. “You didn’t see his
face.”

Christ, they were reading more into this than I thought they would
, I cursed myself. When is this going to stop? When am I going to wake up? Desperate to try and steer them away from the whole
Ripper conspiracy thing, I said, “Look, none of this makes sense. How would he have travelled halfway around the world
with me?”

“I thought you had an interest in vampires?” the preacher said.

“I do,” I told him.

“Then you don’t think it could be possible he could have brought you here? Vampires take on many forms. They can
appear young or old, as mist or fog, and vanish in the blink of an eye. They can cross oceans of time – they have eternal
life. He could have brought you here if it had been his wish to do so and you wouldn’t necessarily remember or…”

“What did you say?” I cut in, my heart beginning to thump.

“That you needn’t necessarily remember how he brought you here, that would account for your loss of memory and…”
the preacher started.

“No, not that,” I snapped. “The crossing oceans of time thing.”

“Vampires can live hundreds – thousands of years,” the preacher explained. “They are not restricted
by time like mortals are…”

The preacher’s voice drifted away like the smoke curling up from the fire.
Oceans of time
, those words flooded my mind until they were almost deafening, and my heart raced. What if Jack the Ripper of 1888 was the
vampire I had followed onto the London Underground in 2012? What if the preacher was right, that this vampire had crossed
oceans of time, lived hundreds of years, and had come back to London one-hundred-and-twenty-four years later?

But what was I doing back in the old west in 1888?

Then as if in answer to my question, the preacher said, “You are not the only person from London who has recently arrived
here.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, peering at him.

“There is an English gentleman by the name of Spencer Drake who wishes to hire out our services,” the preacher
said, the cigarette poking out from beneath his white moustache. “He wants to meet with us tomorrow in the town of Black
Water Gap.”

“What does he want to hire you for?” I asked him.

“Not sure yet,” he said, extinguishing his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. “But it’s interesting,
don’t you think?” and he stared at me with his cold blue eyes.

“Sure,” I whispered, and watched the preacher stand up.

“Tomorrow then,” he said, stretching out his hand towards Louise. She stood, took his hand, and he led her towards
the rear of the wagon. Once they were both inside, the preacher closed the flaps, sealing them both inside.

He definitely wasn’t a preacher
, I thought to myself.

Both Harry and Zoe got up.
Not them, too?
I wondered, but they only went to their horses and returned with what looked like rolls of blankets tucked under their arms.
Harry rolled open the blanket and placed it on the ground a short distance from the fire. Without saying a word, he lay down
on his side and closed his eyes. Zoe came around the fire towards me and handed me one of the blankets that she was carrying.

“Thank you, Zoe,” I said, unrolling the blanket.

“That’s okay,” she smiled at me. I watched her settle down on the ground, pulling the rough-looking blanket
up under her chin.

Lying on top of the blanket which she had given me, I tried to make myself as comfortable as possible. I pulled the collar
of my coat up around my neck and lay on my back, looking up into the dead black sky.

“If it makes you feel any better, I never really believed that you were a vampire,” Zoe suddenly whispered.

I rolled my head to one side and looked at her.

Looking at me from beneath a set of heavy eyelids, Zoe said, “There’s something weird about you – but you’re
no vampire.”

“How could you be so sure?” I whispered back.

“When you were unconscious in the back of that wagon the past few days, we found a handful of garlic in your pocket,
a crucifix around your neck, and a bottle of holy water in your pocket.”

Suddenly remembering how I had followed the killer down onto the Underground with my pockets full of these things, I looked
at Zoe and said, “Where is my stuff now?”

“Marley threw it away,” she whispered back.

I’d heard that name before. Hadn’t I heard the preacher say that name as I had drifted in and out of consciousness
in the back of the wagon? “Who’s Marley?” I whispered back.

But before Zoe had the chance to answer me, Harry spoke in a gruff sounding voice and said, “Zoe, that’s enough
already. Get some sleep.”

Closing her eyes, Zoe rolled onto her side, turning her back towards me. I looked across the camp at Harry, but like Zoe,
he had turned his back to me also.