Scott G. Mariani - The Cross

Fuckers , he thought once more. For two days these pieces of shit had been flapping down on Lavender Close like flocks of vultures, picking at the dead.

Or, in this case, picking at what might have happened to the dead.

Dec could hear his ma and da talking downstairs. Like everyone else on the planet, it seemed they couldn’t get their fill of yakking on about Kate Hawthorne. He cupped his ears and tried not to listen as the voices of his parents drifted up the stairs. It was unbearable. Please, stop.

The story had spread like bubonic plague through Wallingford and might have reached the outer galaxies by now, for all Dec knew. The news of the inexplicable, shockingly sudden demise of the teenager Kate Hawthorne from 16 Lavender Close had been awful enough; but the disappearance of her body, without a trace, from the hospital mortuary just hours after her death, had violently shaken the whole community. The speculation of the town gossips was savage and quick to venture where the media didn’t dare: much more appealing than a gross administrative error was the popular theory that some deranged individual might have removed Kate’s body from the morgue and was keeping it at an unknown location for his own indescribable necrophilic purposes. So many people had got carried away with that notion that the strange, somehow associated death of Bill Andrews, the Hawthornes’ family doctor, had been largely glossed over to make room for it. Andrews had been found slumped on the cold tiles of the morgue floor, near to Kate’s empty slab. Something had stopped the doctor’s heart where he’d stood. A chance cardiac arrest? The shock at finding the dead girl gone? Or something else? Nobody knew.

Nobody but Dec.

Dec knew the truth of what had happened to Kate, and he was pretty sure it explained what had caused her doctor to drop dead of fright. It had almost done the same to him, when he’d met her walking in the grounds of the crumbling Oxfordshire mansion to which she’d been drawn from the morgue. It wasn’t every day the dead girl from next door tried to seduce you in a see-through dress.

But his terrible knowledge was something Dec would admit to no one. Not to the reporters who’d come beating on the Maddons’ front door after they’d found out that Dec and Kate had gone out together, albeit briefly, days before her death. Not to his parents, who’d ferociously warded the press hounds away from their son. And certainly not to the baffled cops who’d come to poke around and find out what Dec knew about her disappearance. Last time he’d tried telling the police about the vampires that were running amok in the Oxfordshire countryside, he’d been ridiculed and almost ended up in jail for his trouble.

In fact, Dec could barely even admit the truth to himself. And there was just one living soul in the world he could openly share it with: Detective Inspector Joel Solomon. Joel had been the only one who’d taken Dec seriously when he’d claimed to have witnessed a vampire ritual killing at Crowmoor Hall near Henley that terrible night. The only person who would have gone back there to investigate with him, when anyone else would have thought it was crazy.

And Joel was the only other person in the world who knew just why Kate Hawthorne had died so suddenly, and then apparently vanished. It had been Joel who had ended Kate’s suffering, armed with the strange stone cross he’d refused to tell Dec too much about. A scene Dec wouldn’t forget. It didn’t matter that it had happened only two days ago. It wouldn’t fade. Even if he lived to be a thousand and one it would stay burned into his mind, like a brand.

Joel hadn’t just freed the girl – he’d saved Dec from the same fate after she’d enticed him with some power that had seemed almost hypnotic. Rendered him helpless with those sweet, sweet, terrible kisses. Dec felt the marks on his neck. They were healing well, but still painful to the touch and he’d taken to wearing a roll-neck jumper to hide them. If Joel hadn’t stopped Kate when he had . . . Dec shuddered. He wondered where Joel was now. The last Dec had seen of him, he’d been heading for Romania to track the monsters who’d done this to Kate. There’d been no contact from him since. Dec had no idea where Joel was, or even if he was still alive.

Dec glanced back at his rumpled bed, and for a second all he wanted in the world was to clamber back into it, yank the covers right over him and stay in that little cocoon for the rest of his life.

He bit his lip. He wouldn’t make the world any less insane by vegetating in his bed. But no way was he going into work, either. Feeling like he’d gone several rounds in one of the bare-knuckle boxing matches his da had told him about from his merchant navy days, he shuffled to the bathroom to pee and brush his teeth and beat his hair into some kind of order; then he sneaked down the stairs.

But it wasn’t easy to sneak past old man Maddon.

‘I need you today,’ his da called from the kitchen doorway.

‘I’m sick,’ Dec said. Out of habit, he’d gone to grab the key to his old VW Golf from the stand in the hall when he remembered it was still in the repair shop after he’d crashed the damn thing getting away from Crowmoor Hall that night. He grabbed the key to his ma’s Renault instead, knowing she wasn’t working today. ‘Got to go out,’ he yelled as he ran to the front door.

‘Thought you were sick, you wee skitter,’ his da growled after him. But Dec was already out of the door and running to the yellow Clio. Before the reporters could collar him, he’d skidded down the drive, pulled a screeching K-turn in the street and gone speeding out of Lavender Close.

Roaring past the Hawthornes’ house, Dec saw that the curtains were pulled tightly shut and felt a stab of desperate pity for Kate’s folks – even if her mother hated him and looked down on his family. He’d have liked to have been able to tell the Hawthornes the truth, to offer them the sense of closure of at least knowing that their daughter was safe and in a better place now.

‘Sure, Dec, that’ll work,’ he muttered to himself as he drove. He could just imagine the scene: the distraught parents looking up red-eyed as the grungy teenager from next door strode into their sitting room and announced: ‘It’s okay, Mrs Hawthorne. Kate was in trouble there for a while, because a vampire called Gabriel Stone made her into his wee playmate. But then a pal of mine, Joel, set her free with this strange-looking cross that has the power to destroy vampires on sight. She’ll be all right now, so she will.’

He sighed. Next thing, it would be the men in white coats coming to catch him with a big butterfly net and drag him off to a padded cell.

Dec headed aimlessly towards the centre of Wallingford. All around him were people going to their work, ferrying their kids to school, doing their shopping. Normal folks going about their normal lives, unaware of the things that were out there, lurking in the shadows by day, stalking their victims by night. Who would be next in line? It could be anybody, anywhere. Dec shuddered. It could be his own family – his ma, his da, Cormac. It could be anyone he knew. And these things would never stop.

‘What are you gonna do ?’ He slammed the steering wheel with his fist. ‘Gotta do something.’ And then it came to him in a flash. He was going to devote his life to destroying these monsters. He was going to make it his mission.

Dec Maddon, vampire hunter. Mallet in hand, silver stakes and crosses glinting against the lining of his long black leather coat. Walking into a party, seeing the heads turning; being asked ‘What line of work are you in, Dec?’; their faces as he coolly handed out his business card. He’d have an office, too. Like the ones in the old detective movies, with his name painted on the window. A busy phone on the desk. A wall safe filled with the tools of his trade.