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Dreaming the Dark (part 2)

"Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."
[Edgar Allan Poe]

The old cinema loomed out of the rapidly darkening twilight, its doors boarded up and chained. Faded posters still advertised long-gone films from behind the broken glass - sex-flicks mostly, Ross noted with disgust, the flesh tones of the pictured models faded to a sickly pallor that rendered them diseased-looking and leprous. Heavy rain was falling. The baroque facade of the cinema had a strange menace in the fading light and the narrowness of the street forced Ross to crane his neck back to see the whole building, foreshortening it so that it seemed to tower over him. He shivered and grinned nervously, remembering the classic shot of the Bates Motel in 'Psycho'. All it needed was a single lit window with a silhouetted figure in it. And at that moment a dim flicker did illuminate one of the smaller windows, a wavering greenish light like the pale glow of luminous paint, wan and somehow unhealthy-looking. Ross gritted his teeth and hunted for something with which to pry the doors open.

The interior of the building was dark. Ross switched on his torch and played it over his surroundings, revealing mildewed carpets and peeling plush wallpaper, stained plaster and broken glass. The air smelled musty from years of disuse, but underlying the staleness there was a thicker, acrid, yeasty smell, like old rot and decay. To Ross's left a cobweb-shrouded staircase led up to the first floor, the gilt of the banisters greenish now and rough with corrosion. He started towards the stairs, then paused as a breath of warm, tainted air blew towards him from the shadows at the far end of the foyer. Double doors stood open there, presumably leading into the auditorium. Ross moved cautiously through them into the cinema's cavernous maw. The seats had all been ripped out, revealing an expanse of mouldy carpet, scattered with plaster-dust and debris. The smell of rot was overpowering now, making Ross struggle to suppress a cough. At the far end of the space, the heavy curtains that had hidden the screen were torn down and lying in a heap. The milky white blankness of the screen was marred by a jagged tear from top to bottom. The edges of the rip moved slightly in a tired breath of air from behind, The greenish light that Ross had noticed from the window earlier glimmered through the tear like marshlight. Gripping the heavy rubberised torch like a cosh, Ross walked to the screen and stepped through, his heart hammering in his chest.

Breathing. That was the first thing Ross noticed, and the short hairs on the back of his neck rose and stirred. All around him, in the shadows, there was the soft susurration of breathing. The smell of decay was almost palpable here, as if the stench was being exhaled with the breath, and the green light wavered and flickered, sourceless and ghastly. Ross cupped the light of the torch and shone it around, The area behind the screen was quite small. Piles of old seats and curtains lay around. With a shock of recognition Ross saw that the walls were covered by the cryptic zig-zags that had been drawn on the wall next to Big Jackie's mutilated body, scratched into the plaster or painted on in a deep rusty colour that Ross thought with a thrill of fear might be dried blood. Here was proof that whatever it was that laired here was Jackie's killer. Against all his instincts of self-preservation Ross swept the torch-beam around the space again. Posters of vampire movies were tacked to the walls too - Vadim's 'Blood and Roses', Lommel's 'Tenderness of the wolves', and the Hammer 'Horror of Dracula'. Staring at Christopher Lee's blood-suffused face in the latter poster Ross suddenly realised the significance of the graffiti; there it was, the same stylised zig-zag shape, framed by Lee's snarling lips - sharp pointed teeth, framed by two long and lethal canines. Vampire teeth! Ross almost laughed at the banality of it.

"Come into my parlour...", said a voice from behind him, Fluorescent light flared suddenly, making him jump.

Ross spun round with a sharp cry of shock. He saw the boy the woman had called Spider clearly for the first time. Short black hair capped a pointed, angular face, inscrutable. He wore silvered glasses, and the lenses reflected back a caricature of Ross, twisted and bulbous. The mirrored shades hid any hint of expression. He might have been wearing a mask for all the lack of human feeling he showed. Once again, Ross seemed to see a subliminal shifting about the dark figure, as if the boy's shape was only stabilised by his own act of looking. All around him there was a stirring as more dark figures rose from behind stacks of chairs or heaped curtaining. They were all ages, from children through to grey-haired elders, some white, some black or asian. All were wearing black, and all were smiling, shifting round him like a wolf-pack round its prey. The tingling hum of power grew inside the room and bright motes of light danced in the air like the dots that flicker at the periphery of vision after over-exertion.

"Said the Spider to the Fly," continued the boy. He paused, his head on one side. "Hey, Fly, aren't you going to say 'help me, help me'?" He laughed softly. "Look for the fly with the white head!"

He pointed at Ross. "Dead man", he said.

Ross lunged at him in desperation, hearing the soft advance of the others all around him. He swung the heavy torch at the boy's head as hard as he could, feeling it connect with a crunch. Spider rocked under the blow, the sunglasses flying off and tinkling away into a corner. He straightened, there was a blur of ambiguous movement, a noise like screeching metal, and something hard yet somehow slick cracked into Ross's face with devastating force. He was flung backwards, landing hard in a cloud of dust and splintered wood. Ross felt blood running down his chin from his nose. Blind with pain, he felt himself yanked upright. The boy moved towards him through a veiled blur of tears, deliberate and menacing. He reached out suddenly with whiplash speed, his arm lengthening and stretching impossibly, far past its natural length. The hand was mutating as it came, turning from a human extremity into some terrible gnarled, spiked claw, each thick digit tipped with a gleaming spike from which viscous liquid dripped slowly. The hand glowed with its own light, a reddish glow as lf the blood within the distended veins were burning. Ross screamed in terror, wanting to disbelieve what he was seeing, yet knowing it for truth.

Through snot and blood, he sobbed like a child as the dreadful hand hovered in front of his eyes. Then the change reversed itself. It was a human hand that Spider raised to the bleeding gash across his temple where the heavy torch had connected. He looked at the blood on his fingers then slowly wiped it onto Ross's cheek. He stared at Ross and his eyes filmed over with red as if the orbs were slowly filling with blood.

"Ouch!" he said, and smiled gently.

Ross stared back, trembling with reaction. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he said, like a mantra, as if the continued repetition could ward off the horror that was promised in the boy's quiet menace.

Apparently satisfied, Spider nodded to the two people holding him and they freed his arms.

"Took her from us," Spider said, conversationally. "Took our toy away. Now we're bored. Need a new toy." He produced a pack of cigarettes and shook one out. He struck a match and lit it. For an instant, as the match flared through his hand, Ross had the unsettling feeling that it was hollow, a translucent shell, containing... something not-flesh. Ross thought he saw something moving, a seething mass, writhing with a horrid insensate life. An image came to him, of lifting an old, damp log and hundreds of beetles, earwigs, scuttling creatures twisting and worming away from the light, That was what it was - a wriggling inside his hand. Then Spider flicked out the match with a peculiar boneless jerk of the wrist and the brief vision was gone, if it had ever existed.

He turned to Ross. "Playtime," he said and smiled his shark's smile.

"What in Christ's name are you?"

"What are we?" the boy mimicked. "What would you like us to be?"

Ross shook his head.

"We're vampires, Ross. Didn't she tell you? The white bitch."

"But vampires don't exist. They're just nightmares and superstition."

Spider grinned again. "You sound like a bad film-script - 'But Professor, surely you can't mean... I'm afraid I do, Joe...'. All right, let's discuss superstition. And vampires. There's just time...before dinner.

"You ever wonder why it is that the more complex a society the less belief there tends to be in the supernatural? Why superstition dies as technology increases? Superstition is a name that a complex society gives to that part of a so-called primitive society's reality that doesn't fit into the complex society's scheme of things. See, if you build a society - like the one outside these walls - where day-to-day life is safe, explained, known, you have to get rid of the unknown, the not-so-easily-explained, the scary. The dark. And as belief in those things - monsters, demons, things that go bump an the night - decreases, as they're forgotten about, so their hold on the world weakens, because they draw their power from people's belief, people's fear. They're forced out, banished. That's what civilisation is; a blocking off of the dark. It's a wall between the known world and the supernatural. But that's all it is. And the dark outside that wall is still there, just hidden, scratching at the surface, picking at the mortar, maybe removing a brick or two here and there, wanting back in. And so long as the civilised society keeps the wall in good repair that's it.

"But when the wall begins to crumble, the dark pushes back. And eventually, when the society breaks down further, one or two inhabitants of the dark get in. Then more. And more... And here we are."

The boy gave an ironic bow. The others applauded mockingly.

"Next question? Oh yes, Vampires. Well, you remembered us pretty well. You can forget all that stuff about bats and wolves and the stake through the heart shit, though. Middle-european folk-tales. And crucifixes - we were here long before that had any meaning. And we're not dead. But then we're not alive in the sense that you are. Undead? Yeah, why not?

"What are vampires? We're power and blood and beautiful violence. We're your most private fantasy and your secretest fear. We're whatever there is inside of you that lives in the warm dark and gnaws at your peace. We're the consummation devoutly to be wished. The ultimate fuck. We're sex and death."

He pointed to one of the others, a woman in late middle-age, streaks of grey in her dark hair.

"Show him," he said.

The woman he indicated moved slightly to one side, smiling at him. Ridiculously, she reminded Ross of his mother. She gave a peculiar kind of shiver and something impossible happened. The flesh of her face and arms writhed and twisted. Threads of luminescence ran through it, following the hidden pathways of veins and arteries. Then it fragmented, curling from the bone, the skin peeling away in wisps of pale vapour, flesh and muscle diffusing into thick, crimson smoke that drifted away revealing the white gleam of bone and tendon, and then even those glowed, melted and twisted away, dissolving as they did so into tendrils of heavy, oily vapour. Her clothes collapsed into themselves slowly as the smoke oozed out of the sleeves and collar. Her jacket and trousers fell to the ground with a soft sound. There she had been was a cloud of smoke, coiling and writhing in on itself despite the stillness of the air. There was a suggestion of burning eyes at the top of the cloud, like flames through fog, and then even those flickered and went out.

The smoke hung for a moment, then started to move towards him, increasing speed as it came. Ross cried out as it enveloped him. The smoke was warm, blood-heat, and it smelled of spoiled meat and burning, rose-petals and musky sweat. He couldn't breath; the smoke was forcing its way into his nose, his ears, his mouth, pressing past his clenched lips with a sickening force. It slid down his throat, filling his stomach. He felt something give down there, a small tearing. There was a terrible sucking sensation and his vision greyed. He could no longer feel the floor beneath his feet. The most terrible thing of all was that the sensation was not entirely unpleasant; there was a horrid sensuality about the slow, slippery progress of the smoke through his body, a burning glow that was almost sexual in its intensity. His prick rose to the occasion and he abandoned himself to the carnal sweetness that was eating him from the inside out As if from a great distance away, he heard himself moan with mingled pleasure and disgust. His balls throbbed. Sparks danced in front of his eyes.

Then he heard Spider's voice. "That's enough." The pressure inside his body slackened and the smoke withdrew as slowly as it had entered. His innards cramped painfully. He wondered fearfully what damage had been done to him. Shuddering with frustrated craving, he opened his eyes to find himself on the floor. Horrified and fascinated, he watched as the last tendrils of smoke trickled out of his nostrils and mouth, reforming into the original twisting cloud. The smoke poured back into the pile of discarded clothes which writhed and flopped, bulking out as flesh solidified inside them. They rose up and the woman stood there again, fresh blood smeared around the lower part of her face. She licked her lips, regarding him with predatory eyes that glowed a reddish silver. Her teeth were gleaming dark-brown spikes like rose-thorns. Dropping her gaze to the bulge in his trousers, she laughed coldly. Ross, torn between arousal and humiliation, enflamed and more scared than he had ever been in his life before, stared up at Spider.

"We're back, Ross," the boy said, as if to a child. He crouched and looked at Ross with terrifying intensity. "The monsters are back. You're tearing down the walls and letting us in. More and more of us. And we're angry. And we're sooooo hungry you wouldn't believe. The human race - your bit of it anyway - has come on a bit since we were last here. The world's changed. But we've changed too. Like chameleons, we take on forms which belong to the world in which we live. We're not the safe old myths made flesh. We're worse. Much worse. We always have been. You've just forgotten us except as fairy stories. But you've always needed us, always desired us. We've always been here in your dreams...and in your nightmares. You see? Dreams can come true. Even the Darkest Dreams."

He nodded at Ross's gasp of recognition, blood-red eyes burning. "No secrets. None. All out in the open now. You want it. You've got it, Enjoy."

For a moment he almost took the offer, hypnotised, wanting consummation of a kind. But then they rushed him, and he turned and ran, desperate. The suddenness of his move surprised them. He felt leather-clad flesh give as has shoulder crashed into one of the children. There was a high, keening shriek of rage. The air buzzed like hornets behind him as he retraced his steps, back out into the street. He plunged out into the night and ran blindly. Finally, he slowed to a walk, hearing no sound of pursuit behind him. He felt a strange sense of loss. Futility washed over him - there was no escape, no beating this. He wasn't sure he even wanted to escape. Not that he had a choice. The night was theirs, and darkness, and the dark was everywhere.

He turned a corner and they were there, coalescing out of mist and fog. They fanned out across the street, Spider in the lead, silver lenses covering his eyes again.

"Where you going, Ross?" he said. "Back to her? White death, Ross. Trust me. Come to us instead."

Another spoke, a middle-aged black man. "Let her have him, Spider."

"No! He's mine!"

"He's hers."

"She loves too much!"

'Let her have him' the vampire had said. Ross knew then with a shock of recognition. Knew what she was, knew she was waiting. Her! 'She loves too much'. Jesus. Home was no refuge; darkness was there too, and so was she, a promise and a threat. No escape. Still he backed away and ran on, seeking crowds and life, but every time he headed for the lights the others blocked his way, menacing shadows, holding back, leaving him for Spider. Finally he found himself backed up against a wall. A broken neon sign flashed erratically green and red, splashing the puddles of the street with bloody light. Behind him was the vestibule of a closed down jewellers shop, the inner doors padlocked, the sliding outer doors of toughened wire-mesh glass ajar. He wheeled around. The street was empty, the vampires melted away into shadows and darkness. His heart thumped. For a moment he allowed himself to believe that they have given up the chase. A moment passed. Then the air split with a tearing rip of thunder and Spider came for him, mere feet away, stepping out of nothing in a blur of diffracted bloody light. He came fast, and power shrieked and buzzed around him. The air rotted before him, stinking. He was naked, changing as he came, his flesh bubbling with instability. He reached for Ross, eyes blazing with hunger.

Ross felt his collar tear as he flung himself through the first doors. As he twisted round Spider's hands were inches from his eyes. He ducked under the vampire's grasp and with a desperate strength spun and slammed the door closed behind him with a screech of metal as it slid in its rusted runners. There was a loud metallic snap as the door locked shut and a splintering crack as the safety-glass crazed into a spider- web pattern...then a shrill screaming. The door had slammed into its frame with such force as it locked shut that the metal had buckled and bent. The sharp edge had cut deep into the boy's outstretched arm just at the elbow, holding him fast like the jaws of a trap. Blood oozed thickly from the wound. Inches from Ross's face the boy's hand clutched and shuddered weakly, the skin rippling.

For an instant Ross was horrified at what he had done. He had a crazy impulse to claw at the door, open it, to help the boy in his agony. Then he saw Spider's face. Despite the shrieking there was no expression of pain on his features, only a blind rage. He stared at Ross through the cracked glass. The flesh of his face seemed to flow and shift, sliding over the bones of the skull like wax. The boy's mouth split open in that hideous, shark-like grin. Ross pressed himself back against the wall as far as he could go, hypnotized by the mouth pressed up against the glass. Teeth were erupting through the gums, dozens of them, in jagged shards and clusters, and the tongue had become a ridged, pulsating tube secreting greenish liquid that frosted the glass like acid where it smeared. Spider heaved and struggled, trying to free his arm, his shrieking reaching a new pitch of fury.

Ross searched his mind desperately for a way out, remembering the vampire woman's earlier dissolving into smoke. The door between him and the boy was locked but there were spaces all around it where the smoke could enter. The doors behind his back were firmly locked. No way out. Knowing he was lost, he waited for the boy to make the change.

It didn't happen. Realisation dawned on Ross. The raging desperation in the boy's attempts to free himself, his evident frustration, all were evidence that Spider was prevented from escaping in that way. He could not change. Ross laughed, a crazy howl of relief. There were rules, even if they weren't the old Hammer Horror ones. He wasn't out this situation yet, but a stalemate was better odds than none.

He jerked his face towards the boy's, reckless in his triumph. "Why don't you go to smoke?" he shouted. "Get me, why don't you? Just slide in here and get me, fucking son of a bitch!"

Spider bared his fangs, his features contorted with fury, and screamed with rage and frustration. Ross laughed in his face.

"You can't! You have to be free to go to smoke, don't you? You're trapped!" He laughed hysterically until he found himself sobbing instead and covered his face with his hands. He knuckled his eyes like a child and stared at Spider who had quieted and stared back at him without blinking. Suddenly the boy smiled, arrogant. He arched an eyebrow at Ross as if daring him; Ross found that he was sweating and trembling uncontrollably. His stomach cramped with stabbing pains suddenly and he wanted to piss desperately. Something very bad was about to happen.

When it came it was still unexpected.

Suddenly Spider whipped his body to one side as if starting a pirouette that, held fast as he was, he could not possibly finish. Ross flinched as a shoulder slammed into the glass in front of his face. There was a ghastly, wet, splintering sound like someone snapping damp wood, and Spider's trapped arm bent back on itself just above the trapped elbow joint, almost at right-angles. Sweat broke out on the boy's brow and his face went the colour of old, bad milk. His scarlet eyes locked on to Ross's and he grinned.

"Oops," he said. "Bad break." He spun back the other way and broken bone-ends ripped bloodily through the leather sleeve clothing his upper arm. Then he was snarling, and flinging himself from side to side like an animal in a trap. Ross bit back a horrified scream as he saw the leather tear and the flesh of Spider's arm stretch like putty suddenly. Sick grinding sounds came from inside the broken limb. The skin split and scarlet blood spurted, spattering the glass. The boy struggled harder, his mouth stretched in a grin of triumph. Abruptly both leather sleeve and the flesh of his arm tore and parted stringily, tendons snapping. The exposed tissue was bright red like meat in a butcher's window, and jagged white bone gleamed among the muscle and slick sinews. Blood sprayed the glass of the door with incredible force. Through the smeary redness Ross saw Spider leap backwards, free. He chuckled and waved the tattered stump of his arm tauntingly, spattering blood. His mouth opened impossibly wide, like a shark's, revealing a forest of needle-teeth, and he hissed at Ross venomously. "Freeeeeeeeeee..." There was a smell of old burning and power shook the air. When Spider's flesh started to drift and diffuse into crimson smoke Ross closed his eyes, and waited to die.

When he opened them again Spider had gone. The empty flashing of the neon lit the space where he had been. Ross knew that he would never feel safe again, forever. There was a foul smell of spoiled meat in the air. The limb that the vampire boy had left behind was rotten already, the skin a greenish-brown and furred with mould, the flesh dropping off the bones in strings and tatters. Ross turned around and brought up the contents of his stomach in a searing flood that left him weak and gasping.

"So now you know," the girl said from behind him.

The shattered glass door was open. She stood in the same place that Spider had stood, her white hair haloed by the light, her face in shadow.

"He's gone," she said. "You hurt him. He knew he couldn't face me, not hurt and on his own. He'll come again. But there's time. Come home..."

He heard the hunger in her voice. "Just get the fuck away from me!" he said and walked away. He paused after a dozen steps and looked back. She had gone. He felt a loneliness too deep for tears. All alone. He was all alone and out there was the night, and it was full of shadows. He needed time. Then he would go to her, he knew.

Go to part 3