Chris Holm - The Big Reap

“Words to live by,” I said, wide-eyed, horrified, and trying not to puke.

Lilith shook viscera off her hands with nonchalant grace and stepped lightly toward the arrow slit to the right of the door we’d just exited. Three feet high, but a scant six inches wide, it looked out over the craggy mountain slope, the village of Nevazut, and the switchback dirt road that connected the two. “Come on,” she said, “we’d best get moving.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because the rest will be here soon.”

I trotted over to the window and looked out. The mountainside was crawling with them, hundreds, maybe more. Ten times the number I would have guessed the town contained. Some, as haggard as the one Lilith just felled, charging up the dirt path at a sprint; some even farther gone scrabbling on all fours straight up the steep mountain slope. A few of the more human specimens carried torches, which pushed back the night and their fellow creatures both, who shrank from the illumination as would any nocturnal beast. All but the most animal of them had weapons — pitchforks, scythes, axes, and the like. And they were all headed this way. In fact, even though I peered out from a narrow slit in a slab of rock meters deep, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, to a one, they were looking at me.

It occurred to me then where they’d all come from. These weren’t simply the current female occupants of Nevazut. This was all the women who’d ever lived here. Ten generations. Twenty. Robbed of the release of death by a dark master intent on amassing an army on the off chance they’d prove necessary.

Looking at ’em all, I wasn’t too psyched to be that half-chance.

“You know what?” I said. “You’re right, let’s get moving. Where to?”

Lilith gestured down the broad, drafty hall, toward a vast open space with ornate staircases on either side. “Up,” she said, “to Grigori’s study. Our best bet to find out where he’s gone.”

We ran in silence down the hall and up the stairs. The hall was pale stone, studded everywhere with heads of large game: bear, deer, elk, ram, musk ox. The modern era’s decorative equivalent of Grigori’s favored heads-on-pikes motif, I guessed. As the hall widened into the great room that housed the twin staircases, I saw he had complete specimen trophies as well: elephants and lions and gazelles, all staring at us with lifeless eyes of glass as we sprinted past.

I took the stairs two at a time, my hand trailing along the wooden banister for balance, each footfall sinking into the heavy pile of a runner the color of blood. One floor. Two. Heavy wooden doors, fixed with hinges and cross-braces of iron, blurred by on either side. Lilith moved so fast ahead of me I could barely see her.

Somewhere, in the distance, I heard the brittle-bone-snap of old wood splitting. Pictured a door much like these only larger giving in and vampires pouring through like ants out of a mound.

They were inside.

We reached the main landing, onto the left- and right-hand side of which the two sets of stairs on either side of the great room connected. I turned and looked behind me, then wished I hadn’t. They’d reached the great room, scrabbling along the floor and walls. I watched, frozen in horror, as they approached. And then I felt Lilith’s iron grip on my elbow, pulling me backward, toward the landing’s largest door, which was centered on the back wall of the room.

She threw it open, tossed me inside. And then she stepped inside herself, slamming shut the heavy door and dropping into place what sounded in the darkness like a heavy wooden beam, barring entry to anyone or anything outside.

A lantern flared, bathing the room in amber light.

An office. Large, drafty, and high-ceilinged, with two slit windows like down below, no glass in either, and a cold, ash-filled fireplace expansive enough for me and five friends to stand inside, provided I actually had five friends, and we all agreed to stoop a little. I worried its chimney was large enough to afford some enterprising vampire entry to the room, and apparently, so did Lilith, because she yanked at a lever to one side of the mantle, and — with a grinding protest of long-immobile iron — closed the flue, for all the good it’d likely do.

Above the fireplace was an oil painting, four feet by seven or thereabouts. It depicted a smiling Grigori in the foreground. Behind him was the castle in which we stood — blood running from its windows, and heads on pikes all around. Two tapestries hung floor to ceiling in the room, one between the narrow windows, and another on the wall that contained neither door nor fireplace. The former depicted a great war between angels and demons, with nine observers to one side looking on. The latter depicted a great flood.

In the center of the room was a desk. It was the size of your average aircraft carrier, piled high with books and scrolls and, to my surprise, a sleek desktop computer, the kind that’s all flat-screen and wireless and stuff, with a keyboard and a mouse that aren’t attached. But the computer was tipped over and all smashed up, a small pry bar atop the ruined tech. I guess he didn’t want us checking out his search history or me Googling to find a prospective new vessel. Behind the desk was a tall, ornate chair that looked as if it had been originally intended for a place of worship; it had a tapered back some seven feet high with a peak like a church steeple, and a wooden cross atop it.

I guess irony wasn’t dead after all.

I took in the scene, huffing and puffing from my recent sprint up the stairs. My Ricou-bitten shoulder was throbbing like toothache. My scabbed-over trachea had begun oozing blood anew. As I sucked wind, I caught a harsh, boozy note in the chill office air, and noted that the papers on one side of the desk were stained yellow and warped into an undulating, crinkly mess, as if wetted and then dried. Glass shards glinted dully among them, as well as an intact, corked bottle neck, and as I approached to look, I caught a glimpse of something else, on the floor behind the desk; something disgusting. A shriveled, glistening green-brown mess of strange organic matter about the size of a high-end sleeping bag — the kind that looks like a mummy’s wrap, or a cocoon — gone downy white in patches from some sort of fungal infection, its mucoid secretions seeping into the stonework beneath and running weak-tea-brown in the cracks between the flagstones. Beside it was a stack of folded clothes I recognized as Grigori’s. Some feet away there was a small wooden crate, its lid pried open and leaning against one side of it, a mass of straw visible within.

“Grigori, you naughty man,” said Lilith, and I thought I caught a note of admiration in her voice. “Ricou wasn’t all you brought back here from the Americas, was he?”

“Come again?”

“I know where he’s gone — or, rather, I’ve I good idea how he got there. And more importantly, how you can follow.”

There was a thud at the door. Two hundred pounds of wood and iron rattled like cheap particleboard. Strong though it was, that door wouldn’t keep them out forever.

“You mean how we can follow.”

“No, I don’t. This mode of transportation is inaccessible to those of us who no longer inhabit organic vessels — to the Chosen, to the Fallen, and to me. I suspect that’s why Grigori went to the trouble of procuring it, despite its rarity, expense, and unpleasantness.”

Another smack against the door, more forceful this time. I heard a groan as the bolts that affixed the metal brackets holding the beam lock in place began to loosen. “Okay,” I said, “you wanna tell me what, exactly, we’re talking about here?”

“Sure,” she said, plucking an unlabeled, clear glass bottle full of slightly cloudy yellow liquid, in which floated something thumb-sized, curled, and white, from the shipping crate. She held it up for me to see, “you’re going through a wormhole.”