CHAPTER 12.
It was colder than it had been for months as John walked to work the next evening. A harsh wind blew from the north, and brought rain with it.
Autumn was dying and winter was coming, but John Harvey liked the winter. The nights were longer, and more darkness meant more time and more freedom.
Despite the weather he strode to work filled with energy and determination, a long, thin object wrapped in a bed sheet tucked under his arm.
He entered his pub, put the object on the bar, shuck the rain from his hat and jacket, hung them up, then put the object on a shelf under the bar.
He hoped it would help, and knew it probably wouldn’t. It probably would be nothing compared to that which his enemy would attack him with. He hoped Lloyd came back soon. Lloyd would have guns, and traps, and a plan, and contacts, and contacts with more guns, and more traps and more plans…
“Alright John,” Olly greeted him. “What’s that?”
“Protection. Get yourself home, mate, Molly will be here soon.”
“Ok John. Cheers.”
Olly lit a cigarette and walked out into the night, leaving the pub empty. John started to wipe down the bar, and decided that if it stayed quite he might have to do some paperwork.
A few minutes later Molly came in with a long sports bag. She said hello to him then took a hockey stick out of her bag and leaned it in the corner of the back room by her coat as though it were the most normal thing in the world.
“What’s that Molly?”
“Protection.”
“Look here Molly, if there is any trouble I don’t want you getting involved.”
“This is the 21st Century, John, a lady can kick arse if she wants to… I rang Charlotte
“Understood.”
“When is the new moon?”
“Friday night.”
“Shit. That’s only three days. Charlotte
“I don’t think she should get involved.”
“If she wants to get involved, then she will do,” her smile was sharp and her eyes bright. “Dave might come down too. He’s not soft, and he’ll do anything I ask.”
“Maybe. The thing is that Victoria
“Shit. Have you told her?”
“No, don’t wish to bother her. It might be nothing. I don’t want this place looking like a war zone when she visits, but I don’t want any trouble here. Perhaps you and Charlotte could keep an eye on her. I don’t want this blown out of proportion. We have to carry on as normal.”
“Sure, ‘keep calm and carry on’… Is that your sword I see behind the bar?”
“Yes.”
“I bet she’s really sharp, isn’t she…”
“Yes, she is.”
It seemed that the weather was keeping people at home, because the pub was dead for an hour. Molly cleaned glasses, then put some music on and had a cigarette and a cup of tea. John looked at his pile of paperwork, rearranging the work schedules so that everyone was working on Friday, he was off on Saturday and Sunday, and no one was overworked. In the end he had to work everyday the following week.
Eventually Tony came in with five of his biker friends. They all wore leather jackets with patches sown on which marked them as members of ‘The Antichrist’s Acolytes’. They looked far more smug and purposeful than usual. Tony ordered a round of drinks, after patting John heavily on the back, then gave him a firm hand shake.
“My lads have never been beaten,” Tony said with a wink.
“Appreciate that Tony. It’s Friday night we have to worry about.”
“Don’t you worry, son. My lads will be here every night, and on Friday we’ll be here from opening till closing.”
It was not unusual for Tony and his mates to be in the pub from opening to closing on most nights, but John appreciated the offer.
“Thanks Tony. That round’s on the house.”
“Cheers,” Tony’s hard face creased in thought for a moment. “Is your mate Lloyd around?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Good.”
Tony and his men took their drinks to a large bench near the door, and Molly joined John at the bar.
“The Count is in for a nasty shock if those lot are about,” Molly said.
“This is going to turn into a riot,” John replied.
“You’re worried about Victoria
“She has lived through worse.”
“Are you going to call her tonight?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Good, best not to look too keen.”
“Am not ‘too keen’.”
“Don’t try to lie to me, John Harvey. I know that you look like when you’re in love.”
He could not argue with that.
John watched Tony and his friends as they drank that night. The battered leather which they wore like armour. The leathery winkles on their chiselled faces. The way their rings and earrings caught the light. They were warriors, but at the end of the day, they were old men.
My lads have never been beaten, he heard Tony say again in his mind.
They had been around for along time, and never been beaten. Like The Old Guard, like the weather beaten officers in Wellington
She had been having a nightmare.
In the nightmare a creature pursued her. Half way between Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Nosferatu. A bald headed monster with deathly pale skin and long claws, wearing a diner suit under a long, black cowl.
It chased her along the street, and into a grave yard. She walked as fast as she could, too tired and too scared to run, but it was always a few steps behind her. She could hear its hissing breath over the thunder of her heart beat. It was dark as she dodged around grave stones and under trees.
Suddenly it had reached out and touched her with its cold, pale hand. Silently she had screamed, and somehow broken into a run. But it followed her.
It pursued her into an abandoned warehouse full of rats and broken crates and rusting barrels. She ran through the vast, dark building, hearing its footsteps hammering behind her. At the end of the warehouse, she ran up a flight of creaking iron steps. The vampire followed. She reached the top and ran along a swaying walkway… to a dead end.
Cold sweat dripping off her face, she crawled into the corner. Overcome with fear, and desperate to disappear into the wall. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nowhere to go.
A hand touched her back.
Startled, she turned and saw the monster standing over her.
It smiled.
It fangs were not so monstrous now. Its talons not so long. There was a trace of colour in its pale flesh.
“Will you listen to me now?” It hissed.
Then she had woken.
She wiped the sweat from her brow and drank a sip of water, then smuggled down next to her boyfriend’s warm body.
When she woke again she was somewhere else.
Her bed was low to the ground and made of intricately carved wood, with a thick, lumpy feather mattress and woollen blankets. The floor was made of stone stabs and had a single rug made from a wolf’s pelt. The walls were made of stone, and light- somehow she knew it was the light of sunset- glowed through one tiny window.
The man beside her was different too. His hair was long and fey, more like an animal’s than a man, his face was handsome, despite bruising around the mouth and eyes. One of his strong arms was in a splint. On top of a pile of clothes by the bed, his broadsword and dagger lay discarded.
She too was different. Younger and with fairer skin. Her hair, although brushed to a fine shine, was wilder too, as thought it had never known shampoo or conditioner. She sensed, in the insane logic of dreams, that she was the same person, the same Alice, but at the same time, not the same Alice
And this was all fine and normal. She had a little longer before she had to be up and her husband- she was sure the wounded warrior was her husband- needed his sleep. So she lay beside him and drifted back to sleep.
The next time she woke she was back in her own bed next to Sam.
She pinched herself to make sure she was awake, then kissed Sam’s sleeping face. It was just past dawn, but she did not want to go back to sleep. She did not trust herself to dream again.
She got out of bed, pulled on her dressing gown, and drank the last of the water on her bedside table.
Then she went through to the bathroom and splashed water onto her face to wake herself up. Then she began brushing her teeth. Half way through brushing her teeth, when most of the toothpaste was gone, she smiled at her reflection.
Her reflection smiled back- but in the mirror she had long, canine fangs.
Her heart skipped a beat.
She blinked.
The fangs were gone.
The touched her mouth to make sure, then quickly finished brushing her teeth and washed and brushed her hair without looking at the mirror.
I’m stressed and tired, she told herself. All I need to do is spend all day eating chocolate ice cream and watching Romantic Comedies, and then everything will be fine…
On Thursday evening John walked into his pub to find Molly waiting for him behind the bar. Tony and a few of his gang nodded at him from across the dim room.
“Look at this,” Molly said, skipping any greeting. Her face was paler and her eyes even more intense than ever.
She was holding a copy of the local newspaper, which had come out that morning. The head line on the front page read; ‘HORROR! AMINAMAL ATTACK’. The article described, in tabloid fashion, how a man had been found in his own back garden on Wednesday night with his throat ripped out. There was no other sign of injury and no sign of a struggle. The police suspected that he had been attacked by one of the dangerous, banned breeds of bulldogs which, the paper said, were commonly owned by unemployed people. It was also possible, according to the newspaper, that the unfortunate man had been attacked by a wild animal which had escaped from a zoo, or the mysterious local Big Black Cat. Or it may have been the work of hoddie clad youths on drugs. In the bottom left hand corner was a tasteless cartoon of a sheep with fangs wearing a hoddie.
“This is not good,” said John.
“Heard anything from Lloyd recently?” Molly asked coldly.
“No. Lloyd would no do this. Or at least Lloyd would not do this in this own territory and leave that mess lying around for the police to find. This is the work of a vampyre gone mad.”
“What, like the sort of mad where you think you’ve been alive for over three hundred years without dying?”
“Aye. This was my enemy’s work.”
At the other side of the room, Tony and his men were debating the pros and cons of owning huge, vicious dogs.
The pub was quite that night, so they closed at midnight, which was unusually early.
When John got home he found that an envelope had been put through his letter box. The envelope was of high quality paper with the words ‘John Harvey Esquire’ written in a hand which may once have been very elegant but was now simply spidery. It was sealed with a lump of red wax stamped with the initials ‘C. S. G.’
He ripped it open, and written on watermarked paper in the same hand writing were the words;
“Dear John Harvey,
I hope that his letter finds you in the most wrenched health.
Tomorrow I shall come to claim my debt. A debt for which you owe me over two centuries of interest. First I shall take your tavern. Then, when you are suffering terrible poverty, I shall take your home. When you are destitute, and those closest to you despair for your lowly soul, I shall take your woman for my own. Then, long after you have despaired of life, and when you least expect it, I shall kill you, and drink every last drop of your blood.
Only then will your debt be repaid.
Yours sincerely,
The Count de Saint Germaine.”
John dropped the letter on the floor, went through to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of wine and began to fry a steak. When he had finished cooking he retired to his front room, put on a folk music CD, and sat back with his meal, trying to relax.
After his meal he was tempted to have another glass of wine, but he decided that he needed to keep sharp. Instead he selected his favourite book of Blake’s poetry and read that. After only four pages he found that he could not concentrate.
He wanted to phone Victoria
He took his penknife from his pocket and tested the blade. Not sharp enough. He spent half an hour sharpening that.
Then he routed about in his desk until he found a Rifleman’s Sword Bayonet which he had owned since he was a teenager. It was rusty and blunt. He cleaned the blade with oil and a rough clothe, then polished the brass hilt and handle, then sharpened the blade.
By the time he was finished the old weapon shone like silver, and the blade was like a razor.
He was tired then, but it was too early to sleep, so he sat with the sword bayonet across his lap, in a candle lit room and listened to another folk CD.
His mind drifted back to the time of Henry the Fifth. He sat in a huge hall with Sir Lloyd and his beautiful wife Marion, and with his own wife (whose name he had forgotten over the ages, now he could only remember how happy she looked on that night, and how her hair used to shine in the moonlight as he walked with her through the meadows). At one end of the hall the king sat upon a throne and laughed. The hundreds of other knights and ladies in the hall were merry too. Standing in the middle of the room where men playing instruments very much like fiddles and flutes and violins. Another man sung in a sweet voice like a woman’s. Lloyd drank hard, trying to block out the pain that his lost eye still caused him.
It was a good time, but the memory did not last long.
Eventually, well before sunrise, he went to his bed, put the sword bayonet under his pillow, and tried to sleep.
The next evening, he checked that his knife was in his pocket before he left the house.
He wished that he had thought to get a present to give to Victoria
The sky was very dark. A few stars shone, but the moon seemed to mock him with her absence. It was a long walk to the tavern.
Outside the Black Boar, Olly, Tony and four of Tony’s men stood smoking and waiting.
“Good evening,” he greeted them.
“Evenin’ son,” Tony greeted him with a firm handshake.
“Evening mate,” Olly said, his voice dry from chain smoking.
John looked the barman up and down, and saw a bump in the big leg side pocket of his combat trousers.
“What’s that Olly?”
“This?” Olly took the largest spanner which John had ever seen out of his trousers. “This is my fucking tool mate.”
John could not help but smile. He did not want to know what Tony and his men would have tucked into belts and boots.
“Listen to me, Olly,” he said. “Stay out of trouble. Let me do the talking, stand behind me if it gets heavy. Your job is to make sure that nothing in our pub gets damaged, including the customers.”
Olly nodded and put his spanner back in his pocket.
He strode into the pub, which was as dark as always and the atmosphere as tense as a funeral. Molly and Dave stood behind the bar, as straight as soldiers on parade. Charlotte
Then he saw, like a beacon in the dark, battlefield atmosphere of the room, a vase of white lilies stood in the middle of the bar.
“Good evening my friends,” John addressed the room.
“Alright John,” she said softly. “Me and Charlotte got the flowers for you to give to Victoria
“Thanks Molly,” he said as he let her go. “Thank you all for coming here. Need everyone to stay calm tonight. Molly and Charlotte, I would like you to look after Charlotte
There was no point in trying to tell Tony’s gang what to do.
The pub was quite that evening. No one had much to say to each other. Molly, Charlotte and Dave sat together, which would have been awkward at the best of times. The bikers were in the mood for business. The few other people who came in only stayed for one drink. It was not a place for fun that night.
John checked his watch constantly. Waiting for Victoria
Time dragged on.
Then, at a quarter to twelve, his enemies strode in.
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