Vampyrrhic

  VAMPYRRHIC

  SIMON CLARK

  © Simon Clark 1998

  Simon Clark has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1998 by Hodder & Stoughton

  Published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Venture, an imprint of Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  IT BEGINS IN DARKNESS

  l. The Hotel Room. Midnight.

  2.Video Diary. Half-past Midnight.

  3.The Dead Box. Seven Days Ago.

  4.Late-Night Television

  5.Ghosts on Film

  6. 1:15 A.M.

  7

  CHAPTER 1

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 2

  1

  2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 8

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 11

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 15

  1

  2

  4

  CHAPTER 16

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 17

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  CHAPTER 18

  1

  2

  CHAPTER 19

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER 20

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  CHAPTER 21

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  CHAPTER 24

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 25

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  CHAPTER 26

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER 27

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER 28

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 29

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  CHAPTER 30

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 31

  1

  2

  CHAPTER 32

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER 33

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  CHAPTER 34

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 35

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 36

  1

  CHAPTER 37

  1

  2

  CHAPTER 38

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  CHAPTER 39

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  CHAPTER 40

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER 41

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  CHAPTER 42

  1

  2

  3

  CHAPTER 43

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER 44

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  CHAPTER 45

  IT ENDS IN DARKNESS

  1.One Year Later

  2.Song For A Dead Hero

  3.Unfinished Business

  4.Envoi

  IT BEGINS IN DARKNESS

  l. The Hotel Room. Midnight.

  She was twenty-three years old; fair-haired, dark-eyed.

  She couldn’t sleep, even though she’d been in bed for more than an hour.

  The reason for this sleeplessness?

  She was frightened. So frightened it felt as if her heart had become frozen into a great ball of blue ice. It chilled her blood from head to toe.

  The conviction that someone was pacing the hotel corridor outside her door had lodged itself deep within her brain. Pacing up and down, up and down. She heard nothing, that was true, but she sensed it. If she closed her eyes she could feel, as if they were her own, those silently pacing feet, pressing down against the dull red carpet beyond her hotel room door. The feet, in her imagination, were always bare.

  She pulled the sheet up as far as her nose and closed her eyes.

  But the feet continued to pace silently outside her door. Bare toes sank into what remained of the pile of the thirty-year-old hotel carpet.

  I could open the door and see who’s there.

  The same thought always occurred to her.

  But to open the door she would have to drag aside the heavy chest of drawers that barricaded it.

  Also, lately, she had begun to imagine who it might be on the other side of the door, pacing relentlessly hour after hour, night after night. Her imagination always wickedly conjured up pictures of a fat man with blood-red holes in his face where the eyes should have been.

  The first lord of mischief is Imagination. It was always eager to slip into her mind’s eye those images that are calculated so accurately to frighten.

  Bernice, before you switch off the light, look under the bed for the lurking psychopath — and is that a severed hand in the bottom of the wardrobe? And don’t forget the hungry rat lurking in the S-bend of the lavatory as you sit on the toilet seat. Can you imagine the pain of such a bite?

  She looked at the door again, the massive chest of drawers that she lugged across the floor each night jammed tight against it. Now barricading the door was as much part and parcel of the bedtime ritual as brushing her teeth, kicking off her slippers and —

  Yes, yes, admit it, Bernice: checking under the bed for that wild-eyed psychopath, who d slither out the moment you were asleep.

  Needless to say there was never anything under the bed — only clots of fluff and (the first time she’d nervously peeked there) a balled pair of grey socks left by some long-departed hotel guest. These she’d poked out with a coathanger and carried at arm’s length to a bin on the landing as if they were radioactive or something.

  And now her imagination, with exquisitely sadistic glee, was telling her that someone paced the landing

  - someone without eyes, Bernice; someone with only holes, big, blood-red holes, where the eyes should be; and he s got a big, fat, bloated body, and big, fat fingers; and he grins as
he snaps on latex gloves stained with the body fluids of sweet young —

  With an irritated sigh she sat up and switched on the bedside light. No, Bernice, she told herself firmly, there is no one pacing up and down outside the door. It is your imagination. Your stinking, lousy, rotten imagination.

  But deep down she knew if she opened the door that would be that. The same fate waited for her as awaited the man in the video.

  2.Video Diary. Half-past Midnight.

  She thought: Alcoholics must do exactly the same thing. They see the bottle of vodka. They know they shouldn’t reach out for it, unscrew the cap, drink. But they can’t stop themselves. The bottle has this power over them. It can make them do anything. The suitcase in the bottom of her wardrobe exerted the same kind of influence. She meant to throw it out — let it take the same one-way trip as the dust-infested socks to the municipal dump! — but she couldn’t.

  It was as if that tan imitation leather suitcase called her name; told her to flick open the silvered clasps, lift the lid, gaze in wonderment at the contents — clean clothes in bags, reporter’s notebooks held together by a rubber band, a pair of white trainers, the soles messed with a black tarry substance. Then the camcorder. And the videos. Those bloody, stupid, awful videos. She should burn them, she really should.

  But like the alcoholic’s bottle of Smirnoff, lying there snugly amid bags of frozen peas and sausages in the freezer or wherever the lush had hidden it, those videos — those bloody, stupid, awful, terrifying videos called her name. In her mind’s eye she could imagine — just as she could imagine the bloated alive/dead man, eyeless and monstrous, pacing beyond her door — she could imagine the camcorder video cassettes. There was one she always found herself watching (it chooses me, I don’t choose it, she’d tell herself with a fatalistic sigh). It bore the handwritten label VIDEO DIARY — ROUGH EDIT.

  Watching it was the last thing she wanted to do.

  For a full minute she stared at the wardrobe, picturing the tan suitcase, the videos inside, cushioned by the carrier bags stuffed with clean clothes…it chooses me, I don’t choose it…

  Then with the defeated sigh of an alcoholic who’d promised there’d never be another bender — never, ever, EVER! — she went to the wardrobe.

  Bernice, this is the last time. Do you hear?

  Shivering, scared, yet strangely eager, she got ready to watch the damned thing.

  3.The Dead Box. Seven Days Ago.

  All hotels — great and small — have a Dead Box. OK, so they give it different names: Lost Property Office, Deadman’s Dump, Junk Room, Dross Hole, Abandoned Belongings Store, Shit Pit, and many more epithets.

  Anyway, in the Station Hotel it was referred to as the Dead Box by the hotel’s proprietress. She said it easily, with the kind of smile that hinted the name Dead Box had a hidden meaning; something more than a little salacious. Bernice had smiled, too, unsure whether Dead Box was supposed to be some deliciously funny double entendre.

  How she had come to find herself mooching through the contents of the Station Hotel’s Dead Box she hadn’t a clue. It might have been that on her day off from the Farm she was at a loose end, that it was raining, that she was bored with the town’s single shopping street, that…oh, what the heck. She’d found herself in the room under the stairs and that was that.

  Looking back now, she could believe forces beyond her understanding had guided her into that room with the sloping ceiling that followed the forty-five-degree angle of the stairs, illuminated by a single light bulb hanging by its flex from the ceiling.

  For various reasons hotel guests sometimes leave without checking out. The obvious one is that they don’t want to — or can’t — pay their bill. To avoid arousing the hotel receptionist’s suspicions, they saunter out without suitcases as if just going for a stroll round town. They don’t return. The suitcases — usually themselves worthless, containing clothes certainly worthless — are packed away into the Dead Box. The Station Hotel’s abandoned suitcases dated back more than a hundred years, and contained a range of clothes that Bernice found astonishing.

  Some caused a lump in her throat. A tin trunk contained a Victorian bride-to-be’s trousseau, consisting of crisp cotton underwear, and a still neatly folded nightdress for the honeymoon that never was. This stimulated Bernice’s imagination. Had lovers eloped? But why had they never married? Perhaps the groom had got cold feet the day before the wedding and left his fiancée at the hotel with the unpaid bills and the precious trousseau bought with what little money the girl had been able to salt away from her work as a parlour maid.

  Some of the older suitcases were grimly fascinating. A hundred years ago, those hell-bent on suicide would book into hotels where they’d carry out the deed. It was a common enough practice. A man wants to die, but he doesn’t want his wife or children to experience the shock of finding his body. So he takes a room in a hotel. He stuffs towels where the door meets the floor and walls to seal the flow of fresh air as best as he can. Then he turns up the gas lanterns without lighting them; he lies down on the bed, fingers knitted together across his chest, where he listens to the whisper of coal gas flooding the room, then his lungs. In the Dead Box Bernice had held up a note written in ornate copperplate…I end this life gladly. There is no one else to blame but me.

  There is no one else to blame but me.

  Victorian suicides were courteous and thoughtful even on the eve of their deaths. They went to the trouble of making sure that no one blamed themselves for their suicide. Invariably they ended the note the same way: There is no one else to blame but me.

  Bernice wondered why the next of kin hadn’t collected the suicide’s belongings. Not that there was anything of real value. And who would really want a dead man’s socks and underpants, after all?

  She looked at the firm, decisive signature in black pencil: William R. Morrow. ‘I wonder which room you died in, Mr Morrow?

  She tried to stop the little voice in her head that rushed to supply the answer. Supply it eagerly and with pictures — Mr Morrow choking his eyes out on the coal gas.

  So: in which room did you die, Mr Morrow?

  Mine. The little voice had said. He died in my room, number 406. Choked his dead eyes out. Shut up, she’d told it; you’re only trying to frighten me. Besides, no one really chokes their eyes out. Savvy?

  Later, Bernice had felt compelled to ask the question: ‘How many people have killed themselves in the hotel?’

  The proprietress gave her usual mischievous grin. ‘Not telling. You’ll only sprag to the other guests and frighten them away. Now, if you find any treasures buried in there, you’ll share them with me, won’t you?’

  Then Bernice struck gold. She found the suitcase containing the camcorder and the videos. The pang she felt in her stomach was a mixture of surprise, delight, curiosity — but, underpinning it all, dismay.

  The sense of dismay intensified.

  Now, in her hotel room at half-past midnight, she knew why she was dismayed.

  ‘Because I knew you were there all along,’ she said to the video tape that she held in her hand. ‘You were waiting for me to find you. And to uncover your secret.’

  Feet on carpet. Feet on carpet. The sensation of someone pacing beyond the door barricaded by the chest of drawers came strongly again. Bare feet on that worn red carpet. Oh no, Mr Morrow, eyeless and hungry and as dead as dead can be, you’re not coming in here to share my bed. Don’t you get tired, Mr Morrow, with that endless pacing? And that endless staring at my bedroom door with those two blood-red holes where your eyes should be? What if I was to open the door and see if there really was —

  There was only one way to gag the wheedling voice. She pushed the tape into the video machine. Shivers shot up her spine as the loading mechanism pulled the cassette from her hands and swallowed it whole into the guts of the machine — a weird sensation that she could never get used to. The way it seems to grab the tape from your fingers as if you’d change your mind and do som
ething else instead.

  Chance’d be a fine thing.

  No; there were no options in that lonely hotel room at midnight, with the rain falling silently on Leppington’s deserted streets.

  It was either the video.

  Or move the chest of drawers, open the door, see what paced the landing.

  Oh, good evening, Mr Morrow: Grown bloated, green-lipped and eyeless in our grave, haven’t we? Come to bed and cuddle up close; I have a lovely bare throat; veins as thick as bananas —

  She shivered a deep, cold shiver that went to the roots of her heart. That damned voice in her head. Wittering nonsense all the time. She had to shut it up.

  There was only the video. It disturbed her and it frightened her. But what choice did she have?

  She switched on the TV, turned it low so as not to wake the other guests who were no doubt sweetly and wonderfully asleep, and pressed the ‘Play’ button on the video machine.

  Then, as if she’d lit the blue touch paper of a particularly dangerous firework, she ran back to bed, huddled up tight, knees pulled up to her chest and watched the screen, the blankets shielding her body as far as the tip of her nose.

  The title came up on the screen:

  A VIDEO DIARY.

  It wasn’t a video diary. It was a horror story.

  4.Late-Night Television

  The girl watched the TV screen from the safety of her bed. There was no introductory music. And once the title VIDEO DIARY had melted from the screen it was replaced with a static shot of the front of the Station Hotel: a four-storeyed red-brick building with a pointed tower at each corner. (The proprietress always referred to it as the Dracula Castle look. ‘Spooky or what, my dear?’ she’d murmur through a haze of cigarette smoke.)

  Bernice guessed the video was a low-budget travelogue intended for some overseas broadcaster. In these days of accountant-driven TV, more and more programmes were being made by just one guy or gal with a camcorder and the chutzpah to say: Look, I can make a great programme all on my own. Sod what the public and critics thought, the accountants at the TV stations loved those low, low budgets.

  Bernice pulled the sheet a little higher. The bed was warm, and it did feel safe. As if an impenetrable force field surrounded it.

  Her eyes locked on the screen with a morbid intensity she’d only experienced once before, when she’d come upon the aftermath of a car smash walking home from school —

  Mum! Mum! Did you see all that blood? It was all dark red and black and there were white bits in it, like lumps of lard…