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Post By The Hooded Hood is behind schedule about... well everything really. Sat Apr 01, 2006 at 06:38:19 am EST |
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Night Nurse #0: The Blood Is The Life | |
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Night Nurse #0: The Blood Is The Life I awoke in darkness, in an unfamiliar bed. My head was pounding and my stomach was churning and I didn’t remember how I got there. What had I had to drink the night before?I turned and there was Alan, lying beside me beneath the covers. Oh, I thought as I saw him, I guess we decided not to wait and have a white wedding then. It wasn’t that big a disappointment. I intended to spend the rest of my life with the man. Whether we came together last night or three weeks on Saturday didn’t really matter too much to me. I just wished I could have remembered it. Alan Copeland was a medical student. We’d dated for the better part of two years, back before I’d even qualified as a nurse. I’d moved to Paradopolis just to be with him as he did his intern year at Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital. I’d have gone a lot further than that to be with him. “Alan,” I called out, softly shaking him, “Wake up. I think we might have gone a little bit too far.” Alan slumped onto his back, his head lolling to show where his neck was a gory ripped mess. His sightless eyes stared at nothing. I screamed. Even as I was screaming I noticed that the rigor mortis had progressed, suggesting he’d been dead more than half a day. Cause of death appeared to be blood loss by massive tissue trauma. And I noticed there was blood on my hands. And I was licking it off. “That’s it,” a cold Teutonic voice whispered in my ear. “Don’t waste it. The blood of those we loved has a taste like no other.” I started and shied away from the tall bald man in the dark blue suit. His eyes seemed to gleam with reflected hellfire as he gazed at me. “You murdered him!” was all I could say, pointing an accusing finger. I was trapped in some windowless room with this terrifying stranger and my first reaction was fury. “Yes,” he agreed. “You helped. Don’t you remember?” As if he had turned a switch in my mind the thoughts came flooding back. How I’d met this stranger before – two nights back? Werner. That was his name. A German name, Prussian. He’d found me leaving the hospital after the late shift and he’d talked to me, and I’d gone with him, and I’d… I’d let him drink my blood. And last night I’d done what he wanted again and called Alan to this place, so that he could take Alan’s life as well as mine. “What have I done?” He smiled a cold triumphant smile, and my eyes fixed on those prominent canine teeth. I yearned for them to touch me as a desperate lover yearns to be taken. “You have given me your body and blood. Twice. And you have tasted the blood of an innocent. Tonight we shall share each other’s ichor again, and then you will be immortal.” I reached out to cradle Alan’s cold ruined body. “I loved him.” “Yes. I could taste that when I devoured you. It made a piquant feast. And now your desolation and despair will add flavour to our banquet tonight.” “Get away from me.” He shook his head and held up his hand, with those impossibly long thin fingers and the yellow crusted nails. “No,” he told me. “Beg me to drink your blood. Beg me to take you.” “I…” There was no way to resist. Andy was dead. I wanted to be with him. “Do it then. I beg you.” “Call me Master.” “I beg you, Master.” A kiss, cold and desolate. A touch, like a crawling corpse. A burning inside my loins and belly, a fluttering in my heart. The taste of his blood on my tongue. His teeth at my throat. Darkness. I was buried, trapped beneath foetid loam and the detritus of the sewers, the weight of filth pressing down on me, stopping from moving, stopping me from breathing. I didn’t need to breathe. It took me a long time, digging my way out, forcing myself to the surface. All the time the hunger was screaming in my belly, the thirst turning my mind into something red and terrible. I thought of the addicts on the drug ward. I was an addict now. I thought that I’d got what I wanted. Andy and I had been together for the whole of our lives. Till death did us part. And now we were dead. I broke to the surface in some kind of dismal cellar. Graf Werner Hertzog had seduced me, and feasted on me, and he’d fed me his infernal ichor, and that’s how a vampire creates a bride. That’s how a vampire creates another vampire to be his slave. But it wasn’t Hertzhog that was waiting for me. The child was handcuffed to a pipe, and she was trembling. She couldn’t have been more than six. I could hear her heart pounding. I could smell her blood. And I was so hungry. She’d been left for me, my first meal, my first victim. She trembled as I came to her, shied away from the naked bloody soil-smeared corpse I’d become. I saw the horror in her face. Instinct took over. “Don’t cry,” I told her. “You’re safe. I’m going to get you out of here.” “The man…” she trembled. “With the eyes.” “Yes.” I knew those eyes, their power. “It’s alright. It’s over. He got us both, but we’re going to escape.” She pulled at the chain that held her wrist. “How?” I snapped the chain with very little effort. Everything seemed so vivid, every motion magnified, every sense cranked to the maximum. I could smell her tears. I could hear the sobs she was trying to hold back. And when I moved I was fast, balanced, graceful. And I was starving. A second idea came to me. Nobody would ever find the child. She was just another piece of meat. “Do no harm,” I said, puzzling the girl. I never knew her name. “Just something I was told when I was trained to be a nurse. First rule of medicine.” I took her hand (so warm, so full of life, so pulsing with blood) and got her to a ladder that led to a manhole cover. I pushed her up onto the street. “Run,” I told her. I couldn’t trust myself near her any longer. “Find someone and ask for help. Stop a car. Just run.” I didn’t go with her because I knew I couldn’t. I’d been told to stay, to wait. I had orders from my master. So I waited for Graf Werner Hertzog with my stomach gnawing on me like a wolf, alone and frightened, having betrayed everything I was except one thing, wondering how long I could hold onto that fragment that was still me. I walked the tunnels. There was no compulsion preventing me from that. I guessed I was in the old sewers beneath the city. I didn’t know how much time had passed (I later learned that I’d been buried for three days), but some inner sense told me that it was night above. My sense of smell alerted my to one particular passage; that and a gnawing sense of dread that wanted to push me away from it. I sloshed through the brackish rainwater and found some old valve room. “Hmph,” snorted the goggle-eyed corpse-pale being that was hanging upside-down like a bad from the steam pipes. His arms were folded across his chest like a corpse’s. His eyes swirled a dull red. “A newly-dead.” He said it like an insult. “Is that what I am?” I asked. “Is this hell?” “No,” scorned the creature. “You’d know if it was. Why am I even wasting my time talking to a barely-dead wisp?” “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know anything. I don’t understand.” “Well that’s more than most newly-dead know,” he conceded. “Most of them imagine they’ve become the dark kings and queens of creation. Transient wisps they are, still clinging to the memories of their mortal lives, their human passions. They’ve read Dracula, or they have seen your moving pictures about the nosferatu. And they call themselves vampires.” “Is that was Werner is? A vampire?” Another snort. “I suppose he is growing into that title,” conceded the pale being. “He learns. He mantles himself in darkness. But he is still a fool.” “And me? I’m dead, aren’t I? Maybe not like in the books and movies, but…” “He has given you the barest sliver of a new existence,” the creature whispered. “But if you ever want to be more than his pet then you have to take the rest for yourself. It was all flooding back now, what I’d done at Werner’s command, how I’d been made to assist in the destruction of Alan, how that monster had made me shred every one of my dreams. I was going to marry Alan. I was going to be a nurse. I was going to save people. Now I was a monster. “What do I have to do?” I demanded. “To be free?” The ancient being held up one impossible long white finger. The nail extended four inches from the tip. “There is one reason I am even taking the trouble to speak with you, newly-dead,” he hissed. “Just one. You had the will to overcome your urge to feed. That shows character. Discipline. If you can do that, now, at birth, when the hunger flames in your belly and the thirst claws at your mind demanding carnage, then you might have the will to survive the ages. Maybe.” “Is that what it comes down to? Will?” “Blood,” the corpse-thing answered. Later I learned he was Vrykolakas the Ancient, an elder nosferatu of the first rank. “Blood is what it comes down to in the end, all of life, all of death. The blood is the life. But what we do with the blood, ah, that is what changes everything.” “I don’t understand.” “You will. You drank Hertzog’s blood, and now you share his glory. He drank yours, and now you are chained to him for as long as he endures. You will never be free until that link of blood between you alters. Never.” “Where is he?” I asked. Vrykolakas seemed to sniff the wind. My senses were magnified manyfold, but his had gone as far beyond mine as mine were beyond a mortal woman. “There is a construction,” he answered, and suddenly there was a picture in my mind of a deconsecrated church. “That is where he is, finishing some old foolishness. Go to him.” That was not what my master had ordered, but at the ancient undead’s word that prohibition seemed to snap. I’ve never yet discovered how powerful Vrykolakas is. I pray I never will. “Now begone from my sight, still-warm,” he scorned. “Before I take back what little you have.” I fled. “What are you doing here?” demanded Hertzog; but he didn’t seem displeased. I’d taken the time to find my clothes, although my white nurse’s uniform was stained almost black with old blood, and I’d followed the image in my mind to the seedy abandoned Sixways church. He wasn’t the only vampire there. No less than a dozen undead were gathered round a cage with seven trembling mortals in it. Mortals. I was already beginning to think like one of the dead. And my hunger hadn’t gone away. “I missed you,” I answered, lying, knowing he would be flattered. “Of course you did,” he smirked. “Well then, come and see what tribute Carnal and his boys have brought me.” “You mean the people?” There were huddled together in their prison, a man, two women, two girls and a boy, all trembling inside the steel box, all tumbled into nightmare. “The very last of the Stein family line originally from Rautlingen in Wurttemburg,” he told me. “It has taken me near to a hundred years to track them all down across the world.” “Why?” I asked, looking at the trembling victims. “Why did you want them?” He chuckled. “A diversion. A hobby. I picked them quite at random all those years ago and decided to eradicate their line from the earth. I shall be quite sorry when I’ve drunk the last of them. I’ll have to select a new family and start all over.” I tried not to tremble at such casual evil. I wondered how I could save them. I knew I could never stand against my master. My blood was his. “Why not let these four go then?” I suggested. “You’ve already won.” “I considered letting the pregnant one go and spawn a new generation to hunt,” he admitted, “but I’m very much looking forward to ripping the child from her womb and sucking it dry.” “Let them go.” He looked at me with amusement. “You try to defy me? Still hanging on to that mortal self-respect? Well well.” I trembled as he turned his eyes and his will onto me. “Go to the cage. Take the boy. Tear his flesh from his face and drink as he bleeds.” “Oh please, don’t make me…” “Do it.” I tried to resist. My muscles burned as they struggled against each other, as I staggered like a spastic robot towards the captured family trembling in their prison. I could smell their fear. They knew death was coming. And then they vanished. All four of them, in a blink, just like that. Gone. “What?” scowled Herzhog. Two of Carnal’s henchmen went down, each with a crossbow bolt to the heart. Whitethorn with a silver tip, blessed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. That’s very bad news for a vampire. The others all reacted in their own ways, but a young woman was already tumbling amongst them, blurred with a speed that seemed impossible. We were so fast. How could she be faster? She rolled low to avoid a slash that would have torn out her windpipe and planted a stake through another vampire’s heart. Two more fell away screaming as she hurled holy water over them. Carnal moved forward but his way was suddenly blocked by an old man with even older-fashioned moustaches and whiskers. He wore a tweed three piece suit and he had a pocketwatch on a chain in his hand. He swung the timepiece like a weapon. As it caught Carnal round the head the vampire exploded into dust. “Wilton!” hissed Werner, and there were lifetimes of hate in his voice. “And Asil Ashling,” the girl replied, hurling a wooden stake at Hertzog’s chest. “A person.” My master caught the shaft in mid-air and crushed it to splinters, but by then he and I were the only undead left; him because he was glaring at Sir Mumphrey Wilton, who he’d first met nearly sixty years before, and me because I was frozen with panic at the carnage around me. I didn’t look like the other vampires, dishevelled and desperate in my bloody nurse’s uniform. I looked more like a victim. That’s what saved me. “You think you could get away with your vile games forever, Count Chompula?” demanded the old man. “You think you can stop me with your little toy, Englander?” “I think he can divert your attention with it,” Asil said, coming in from the side. I could have stopped her. I didn’t. She plunged the stake into Werner’s back. It was as if he was frozen in time. He hardly moved to resist. He exploded into a cloud of darkness that coiled away into the very stones of the floor and walls. I ran again, blindly, desperately. My only hope was that they wouldn’t follow me. It wasn’t until later that night, when instinct had taken my home, that I realised I was free. But free to do what? To become like Werner, a terror of the night? To die properly in some hope of an afterlife with Alan? I looked at myself in the mirror; I wasn’t there. I showered, and my enhanced senses could feel every drop pounding onto my flesh. I washed away the dirt and the old gore, but I couldn’t wash away what was inside me in my blood. As usual, the only clean clothes I had were nurses uniforms. I put one on by habit. It felt right. The Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital had some old-fashioned values. Political correctness had yet to replace the red cross on the nurses’ caps with the caduceus or some other non-religious symbol that wouldn’t offend. It was hard to look at my cap. It hurt. I put it on. It hurt more. And then it didn’t. “Do no harm,” I told myself. There was bottled plasma in ER. There were ways of being a nurse and a vampire. There were people I could save. There was a reason to go on. I could be a Night Nurse. It was in my blood. Continued in Untold Tales of the Parodyverse #267: Underwar Sir Mumphrey Wilton first met Graf Werner Hertzhog in Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Lost Temple of Mystery #13 and #14. Another account of Hertzog’s battle with Asil and Mumphrey appears in Untold Tales #62: Things That Go Bump In The Night More adventures of Grace O’Mercy appear in The Night Nurse Collection The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse Night Nurse image by Dancer Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2006 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2006 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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