Amanda Grange - Mr. Darcy, Vampyre

Georgio visibly blanched.

‘I cannot…’ he said in fear and trembling.

Darcy looked at him with sympathy. ‘I do not expect it. You have faced a challenge that few would have faced and acquitted yourself with great bravery, but the horrors of the passages are not for your kind. It is for me to face them alone.’

‘No!’ said Elizabeth.

‘My love, it is the only way. I have to do this. For you. For me. For us.’

‘And yet,’ said Nicolei speaking slowly, ‘it may not be necessary for anyone to go there. I think there is another way.’

Darcy looked at him enquiringly and Elizabeth followed his gaze. Nicolei was standing next to the wall at the eastern side of the temple, by one of the basins.

‘I have found… I think I have found…’ Nicolei said, ‘…writing.’

He rubbed the surface dirt away with his finger, and Elizabeth could see a fine flowing script underneath.

‘What does it say?’ she asked.

‘It is very old, a dialect. Few speak it now. It says… it says the way will be eased by a… by something close to the… I cannot read this word… something close to the hide… no, the skin… I think this word means father… no, not father, the one who makes. I think it means sire .’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Elizabeth.

‘It means that if I have something worn by my sire, the vampyre who made me, it will smooth my way,’ said Darcy.

‘There is more,’ Nicolei went on, rubbing again with his finger. ‘It says rest in… no, lay in… lay in the hollow. It means, I think, put it in the hollow of the bowl.’

‘If only I had something,’ said Darcy regretfully, ‘but I have nothing. I will have to continue without it.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Elizabeth, struggling to recall a slight memory. She turned to Darcy as it came back to her. ‘When you came to my rescue on the beach, when you thought Lady Catherine was attacking me and knocked her back, she left an indentation in the cliff, and caught in the indentation was her veil. It must have been embedded in the rock when she pulled herself free. I saw it blowing in the breeze.’

Darcy’s face brightened.

‘Then I will fetch it,’ he said energetically. ‘It will not take me long.’

‘It took us hours to get here,’ Elizabeth pointed out.

Darcy smiled, his eyes bright in the torchlight. ‘But I am a vampyre,’ he said.

There was a sudden brief stirring of wind and then, quicker than she would have thought possible, he was gone, a black and fluid form disappearing rapidly from view.

She could hardly take in what had happened and she sat down, her legs feeling suddenly weak. It was a day of marvels, fearful and terrible, yet wonderful and strange.

Nicolei resumed his seat next to her on one of the fallen columns, and Georgio sat on the other one, looking down at the floor silently. As Elizabeth recovered her composure, she found herself wanting to ask him what had happened, but she could not bring herself to speak of it. His colour had returned but when one of the torches sputtered and he lit a new torch from the old, his hands were still shaking.

Nicolei too had fallen silent and appeared to be lost in thought.

Elizabeth prepared herself for a long wait, but before she thought there was any hope of Darcy returning, there was a beating of wings and a rushing of air and he stood once more before them. She saw that he was holding, in his left hand, Lady Catherine’s black veil.

‘You found it!’ she said. ‘I was afraid it might have blown away.’

‘No, it was just where you said it would be,’ he said with a warm smile. Then his face became serious. ‘And now we must see what it will do.’

He walked past the statue of Apollo and then passed between two of the fluted columns until he stood by the wall. The torches could not illuminate the ceiling—only a small portion of the wall around the basin—and the light flickered constantly. He looked at the flowing script for a moment before placing the veil inside. It lay there, slight and insubstantial, nothing more than a shadow in the hollow bowl.

Elizabeth watched it. But as nothing happened, she began to feel a fall in her spirits. It had done nothing. Nor had she, in her heart of hearts, expected it to.

And then, slowly, with a grating noise, the stone wall in front of them began to move. It swung smoothly open and Elizabeth found herself looking across a balcony of rock and into another, much larger cavern, a vast chamber hewn out of the living stone, set some twenty feet below them.

Darcy took the torch in one hand and Elizabeth in the other, and together they moved forward, going through the massive door and standing on the natural stone balcony, which ran around the circumference of the cavern.

Elizabeth looked down. At first she thought there were columns stretching from the ground far below them to the roof high above, but then she saw that they were not columns; they were trees, and their branches were supporting the roof.

‘A petrified forest,’ said Darcy.

Elizabeth looked at the petrified trees in awe, wondering how and when they had turned to stone. Some were exactly as they had been when they were growing, with thick branches supporting thinner branches and ending in twigs, the whole of them carrying petrified leaves that glistened with streaks of copper and green. Some had fallen and lay as stone logs across the forest floor. In between them were petrified ferns. The whole thing had an uncanny appearance, lit by an unnatural light, a bluish purple glow.

Hand in hand, Elizabeth and Darcy began to go down the broad flight of shallow steps that led to the forest floor. Nicolei, who, with the aid of his son, was following them very slowly down the steps, said breathlessly, ‘It is magnificent.’

‘The trees are glowing,’ said Elizabeth. She listened intently. ‘And humming.’

‘You’re right,’ said Darcy, standing still to listen.

Without the sound of their footsteps the hum could be heard more clearly, like the low buzzing of far-off bees.

Elizabeth and Darcy resumed their descent and came at last to the foot of the steps where they stood for a moment looking about them. Now that they were closer, they could see that some of the trees had been carved into strange creatures, neither man nor beast, startling relics of a long forgotten time. And yet the carvings were beautiful in their own way. They stood proudly in the centre of small, randomly spaced clearings or peered out from behind groups of trees, some hesitant, some mischievous, and some bizarre yet glorious to behold.

Elizabeth and Darcy began to move forward, picking their way carefully across the forest floor, stepping over fallen logs, and threading their way between stone ferns. By a strange trick of the light, it appeared as though purple and blue sunbeams were falling through the canopy above them and onto the forest floor, though no light entered the cavern from any opening. It seemed to be an effect of the torchlight reflecting from the minerals in the trees and walls.

They found themselves in a clearing in the centre of the forest, without ever having meant to arrive there, as though they had been led there by uncanny paths. In the centre of the clearing stood a broken trunk, and on top of it, illuminated by one of the weird and marvellous beams of purple light, was a stone tablet. They looked down at the tablet and saw that, etched across it, there were strange runes.

‘I have seen this kind of writing before, in the Count’s library,’ said Darcy, holding the torch closer, the better to see it.

‘Can you read what it says?’ asked Elizabeth.

‘Yes, I can, enough to understand the words at least. But I do not understand what they mean. They say something about falling… something will fall…’