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Post By Villainous vampires and nefarious Nazis from... the Hooded Hood Sun Jun 13, 2004 at 10:29:04 am EDT |
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Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Lost City of Mystery - Part the Fourteenth: Mr Amazing and the Nazi Vampires | |
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| Part the Fourteenth: Mr Amazing and the Nazi Vampires Mr Amazing had no time to do anything clever. He just hauled Graf Hertzhog away from Miss Canterbury and smacked him in the face. The vampire Count didn’t seem to feel it. He gestured with his taloned fingers and Mr Amazing smashed into the brick-lined wall of the tunnel. Then he gestured the other way and hammered his foe into the opposite wall. “How rude of you to interrupt,” he hissed at the stunned Scott Alan. “You Amerikaners have no manners.” Miss Canterbury slipped the cross from her neck, wrapped the chain round her hand, and pressed it to the back of the monster’s pale bald skull. The vampire screeched. “I’m the daughter of Reverend Canterbury,” the girl told him. “What, you think I don’t know how to deal with you?” “I think…” whispered Hertzhog seductively, “that you will drop that bauble to the ground and come to me. Come to me.” “Or not,” said Miss Canterbury, still pressing the holy symbol out towards the nosferatu. “I’ve had a lot of practise at not being mind-controlled recently. Frankly you’re not even in the running.” “Fine,” hissed the Graf. “Then die the hard way!” he moved with preternatural speed, smacking her hand aside as he lunged for her throat. Mr Amazing wrapped himself in the luminous energy he controlled, leapt on the vampire’s back and boxed at those waxy pointed ears. “Not… on my watch… buddy,” he gasped, trying to hold onto consciousness. The vampire swung him round and clutched one bony hand at the hero’s throat. “My orders were only to slay the Englishman and turn the woman. But I will happily destroy you for free.” The undead’s other claw shot out and caught Miss Canterbury as she tried to set him ablaze with her cigarette lighter. She was running out of options. “I shall enjoy having you as my bride-slave,” the Nazi vampire gloated as he dragged her towards him. Miss Canterbury tried to push him away but her hand squelched unpleasantly on his chest and she was forced to her knees before Graf Hertzhog. “Let… her… go…” gasped Scott Alan, struggling to break free. “I think not,” replied Hertzhog, snapping the hero’s neck. “Oh, I think so,” shouted Sir Mumphrey Wilton, racing angrily up the corridor. He had his pocketwatch, the Chronometer of Infinity in his hands. “Let’s rewind that!” he said. The amazing timepiece forced events backwards. Mr Amazing’s spine made an awkward reverse crack as the damage was undone. Mumphrey froze the moment just before the harm was done and wrestled the patriotic hero to the floor out of Hertzhog’s grip. But he couldn’t release Miss Canterbury from her attacker’s time-frozen grasp. Mumphrey hoisted the jagged stake that he’d used against the lesser vampires the Graf had sent against him. Sturmbannführer Graf Anselm Hertzhog had clearly been ordered to eliminate the British agent but not been warned of his peculiar capabilities. That suited the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity just fine. Mumphrey lifted his finger from the time-stop stud and plunged the stake into the vampire’s chest. “Take that, Count Chompula!” he thundered. The vampire looked down at the wooden shard protruding from his chest. “Yes?” he enquired. “And then what?” The attack came too fast for Mumphrey to see. He felt his ribs shatter as Hertzhog hammered his fist forward and he found himself on the ground beside the fallen Mr Amazing trying to breathe. He triggered the timestop by pure reflex. “R-rewind,” he gasped to himself. The pocketwatch took time backwards again, undoing his injuries. But it had used most of its charge. Mumphrey held time still again with the remaining power in the Chronometer. He reached down and grabbed Miss Canterbury’s cross from the floor, then wrapped it round Hertzhog’s hand as it clutched the lady. The he shifted aside to avoid the coming blow and let time spill forwards once more. The vampire screamed as the icon seared his flesh. He released Miss Canterbury by pure reflex, then transformed to mist so the cross and chin tinkled to the floor once more. Then he was a flock of shrieking bats flapping away down the tunnels. Sir Mumphrey helped Miss Canterbury and Mr Amazing to their feet. “Anywhere a chap can get a mug of tea round here?” he asked. “He was a vampire,” Miss Canterbury said for the fifth time. “A vampire. Just like in the books.” “Not quite like in the books,” Sir Mumphrey scowled as he drank his thick steaming brew. “He took a stake through the heart without being tickled. I call that cheatin’.” “This all explains so much though,” Mr Amazing said as he held a damp cloth wadded to his head. “The attacks in the tunnels despite security, the disappearances, the odd deaths, why people acted so strangely, everything. The Nazis must have wanted to sow terror and despair on the island, to break out courage.” “Then the Nazis underestimated people,” grumped Sir Mumphrey. “Besides, they don’t have any vampire meaner or scarier than that little rat with the toothbrush moustache they call Fuhrer.” “I’ve got to find him,” Mr Amazing declared. “Before he kills again. That’s why I was sent here.” “We have to stop him,” agreed Miss Canterbury, “but pardon me – I’m very grateful for the rescue you understand – but wasn’t he sort of killing you when you fought before?” “Well… yes,” agreed Scott Alan, feeling his bruises. “But I’ll find a way. I have to.” “Stakes worked on all those other vampires he created,” brooded Mumphrey. “So why not on Count Chompula?” Miss Canterbury remembered the unpleasant way her hand had squelched on the vampire’s chest. “I think…” she frowned, trying to pull her ideas together, “I wonder if his heart is in his chest at all?” “You’re sayin’ the blaggard’s had it out and put it somewhere for safe keeping?” growled Sir Mumphrey. “Now that really isn’t cricket.” Mr Amazing scratched his aching head. “So how do we find it, or find the bad guy, or anything?” he puzzled. Mumphrey looked carefully at one of the many dials on his gold pocketwatch. “We might stand a chance, if time is on our side,” he adjudged. “Get to the padre, ask for holy water, wafers, that kind of thing. I’ll try and locate Chompula’s lair.” Miss Canterbury waited until Amazing had vanished on his mission before asking, “And how do you intend to do this, Sir Mumphrey?” “One of the functions of the Chronometer is to show past images,” the eccentric Englishman explained. “Recent past only. The further back, the more charge, and I’ve used a lot of chronal energy today already. But if we go back to the tunnels, rewind time visually and follow Chompula’s bat cloud in slow motion so we can keep up…” “We should be able to find where he fled!” The vampire count knew they were coming, of course. He felt the unlife go out of his remaining undead servants one by one as the three mortals approached. He knew when the charmed humans he had enslaved were gently taken down by the American in the ridiculous costume. And he was ready for them. “He’s in here,” Mumphrey called, leading them into the carved sepulchre tomb of Renaissance wanderer Florento de Clement. “Somewhere. The images are very hazy now.” Hertzhog didn’t like the pocketwatch for some reason so he levitated it from the Englishman’s hands and hurled it into to darkness. “I say!” complained Sir Mumphrey Wilton. Then the nosferatu was on Mr Amazing, with teeth and claws, ripping at that annoying uniform, seeking the flesh and blood beneath it. Sir Mumphrey emptied two barrels of shotgun into the vampire, the shells filled with blessed salt and holy wafer. Graf Herzog span away snarling. The weapon couldn’t kill him but it could hurt. At a thought from the vampire, the vermin of the tunnels ran forward. The black squeaking horde were hungry for flesh. Mr Amazing hurled himself against them, forming a luminous energy-shield to hold the vermin at bay. “Keep at him!” he called to Sir Mumphrey. “I’ll hold these things off your back!” “Right,” agreed Mumph. “So come on, Count Chompula. Try and remember what it was like to be a man. Come on out and face me if you dare!” The vampire’s white face was somehow livid as he loomed from the shadows. He seemed not to walk but to float, a black shroud of death with pale talons and beady red eyes. “I dare,” he promised. “Your death will be slow and agonising.” Mumphrey dropped the empty rifle but his service revolver span away from him at a gesture from Graf Hertzhog. The undead gestured again and his adversary was jerked from his feet to dangle helplessly in midair. “You have no idea what you are facing,” mocked the Nazi vampire. “Is it a walking corpse without a heart?” Miss Canterbury wondered, shattering the canopic urn that she’d found in the otherwise empty sarcophagus. “This heart?” The vampire dropped Mumphrey and spun towards her. “Get away from that!” he demanded. Wilton hurled himself on Hertzhog’s back as the nosferatu reached for the lady. “Get away from her! Do it, Hagatha!” Miss Canterbury raised one curious eyebrow at her companion and staked the vampire’s heart. Sturmbannführer Graf Anselm Hertzhog exploded in a cloud of corpse-dust. Mr Amazing limped over to join the others, torn but triumphant. “We did it! We stopped the monster!” “Serves it right for cheatin’” grumped Sir Mumphrey. “Hagatha?” asked Miss Canterbury. In our next exciting episode:Back to Blighty at last, but Sir Mumphrey and Miss Canterbury could hardly expect the sinister Expediter to have got there before them, could they? Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2004 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2004 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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