The sun comes up and the great wall of ice turns into a wall of fire.
I climb. Halfway up the ice-wall my hand slips, but I only fall a few hundred feet. The impact knocks me out, and I wake up hanging from the ice over a snowy abyss. Clutching my way back upward, I have to ignore the pain. Like the cold, it simply doesn’t exist. Only love exists. Drawing me closer to Marion with every frozen inch.
I don’t know how long I’ve climbed, but the sun is almost down when I finally reach the walls of black stone. The outer wall is far easier to climb than the icy slope of the mountain. I catch my breath, adjust my gear, and scale it quickly.
I stand before the dark towers as the sky turns crimson, and I don’t have to wonder which tower holds Marion. I can hear her voice. She calls out to me on the frigid wind. A mass of bloated bats swirls into the sky. Flamelight glimmers in the windows of the fortress now. I follow Marion’s voice. But I don’t speak her name. Not out loud. Not yet.
In the courtyard below the wall vamps rise from their stone couches and rush to intercept me. They shriek at the iron cross as my silver blade cuts them down. I leave a trail of severed limbs and heads behind me. Another crimson trail made by the magic of cross and blade.
Daniel…
Marion’s voice. Calling for me.
I am here…
Come to me…
No need to ask, babe.
By the time I crawl through the window of her bed chamber, my clothes are sticky with vamps’ blood. The silver blade drips in my fist. I leap from window casement to a floor of exotic carpets. It’s slightly warmer in here than outside. Silence replaces the moaning wind. She sits across from me, her eyes bright as lamps. A cold flame burns in the fireplace. Candles along the walls make shadows dance. I smell lavender, and blood, and that unique smell that was always hers. The lovely scent of Marion.
My heart beats faster, and my numb fingers begin to ache.
“Oh, Daniel…” She rises. “I told you not to come after me.”
“But you knew I would,” I say.
She only smiles, showing fangs bright as pearls. Her eyes are still green. Green and glowing. Her lips are bright as blood, her skin pale as snow. She wears a diaphanous gown woven from fog or dreamstuff.
“I love you.” I say the words like a magical spell, feeling stupid and giddy.
She stares at the blue flames writhing in the fireplace.
“I belong to the master now,” she says. Avoiding my eyes.
“No,” I say. “You love me, Marion. I feel it.”
She looks at me the way she used to. She doesn’t deny it.
“It’s not possible,” she says. “You’ll have to kill me.”
Her eyes focus on the iron cross in my left hand. I drop it and the silver blade to the floor. More stains for the master’s fine carpets. My hands tremble like an old man’s.
“I could never hurt you,” I say.
“Then why come all this way? What do you want from me?”
I tear off my shirt to bare my neck.
I don’t have to say another word.
She knows exactly what to do.
I Do the Work of the Bone Queen
After I died, I went wandering about the town. Stars littered the sky like diamonds, and the moon was a curved blade. I reveled in the freedom of ghostliness. No longer would a mangled and deformed body imprison me. I floated along the black alleys strewn with trash, past a crowd of rats gnawing a severed hand. One of the beasts looked threateningly at me as I passed by, its eyes gleaming like minute lanterns. I laughed and willed myself higher, rising above the cracked pavement and the black rooftops of condemned buildings. The town snored below me, a neglected, dying organism rotting in its own filth. A heavy rain fell, passing through my ethereal self, and distant thunder rolled across the flat, gray horizon.
Among the slumped roofs and crumbling towers stood the abandoned factory, a shriveled heart that had once pumped lifeblood into the town. When it had finally ceased operations, years after the industrial accident that crippled me, the town began to diminish. Then came the corpse-like rot. I looked out my window every morning at its boarded windows and rusted gates, wishing that it had closed down before it had ruined my body. Where it used to produce intricate copper components and bulky industrial machines, its only products now were dust and decay.
What surprised me were the watery lights shining from the factory’s windows.
The light struggled to free itself from the fissured brick walls, seeping through cracks in the boarded windows. Floating in the heart of the storm, I realized a magnetic attraction to that dilapidated place. The sensation became a raging hunger, amazing to me since I no longer had need of any food or drink. It was a hunger of the soul. Who could be in the old factory lighting fires or installing generators to shed light down its decrepit hallways?
My phantasmal form slid through the rain toward the speckled walls as lightning flared. Like a wisp of smoke I glided through an ivy-smothered wall and entered the musty bowels of the factory. Orange flames belched from a line of soot-stained furnaces. Silent forms bustled about a collection of worktables. They wore black smocks with heavy hoods. Their faces were indistinguishable in the shadows of these cowls, but I saw that opaque goggles shielded their dim eyes. Gloves of dark rubber covered their hands, and they worked feverishly to assemble some arcane product that made its way down the line. Hundreds of workers lined both sides of the tables, and as I floated near crimson drops spilled from the tables’ edges. They were not working with metal, this odd and faceless crew.
Had a new meat-packing plant moved into town? If so, shouldn’t they have cleaned the rust, mold, and filth from the walls and floors? Weren’t there federal guidelines for such things?
I looked over the workers’ shoulders; they seemed completely oblivious to me. They were not cutting meat. They were assembling something, some unknowable architecture composed of variously shaped chunks of raw meat. At the next table black-gloved hands chose pieces from a pile of shattered bones. Blunt fingers shoved the jagged bone bits into the fleshy sculptures and passed their handiwork on to the next table, where blankets of blistered skin were stretched over the grotesque forms. When these misshapen sculptures of meat, bone, and skin reached the final assembly table, new personnel hung them from metal hooks on rusted lengths of chain. The chains did not hang from any ceiling, but instead depended from a swirling sea of darkness that tossed and heaved above the sculptors’ heads. I expected the dark waters to fall at any moment upon them like a massive, oily tidal wave; but this never happened.
I hovered above the manufacturing tables, an unseen spirit watching the grisly work, and a deep horror surged to fill my bodiless form. What were these bloody sculptures and who were these faceless drones? What gruesome purpose did this installation serve? I imagined a work force of mass murderers engaged in the hopeless endeavor of reassembling the bodies of all those they had slain. But that could not be the case because the final products of their industry, hanging bloody from the hooked chains, came nowhere close to resembling human bodies.
Yet I did notice that after a time suspended in the charnel air of the factory, each of the meat sculptures began to quiver and twist on its hook. If they had mouths, I was sure they would be screaming in agony. Eventually, each of the twitching oddities was drawn upward on its chain and disappeared into the inverted sea of roiling darkness.
I could not watch this process any longer, so I willed myself to float out of the insane factory. Then I discovered that I could not pass back through the sweating walls. Passing into the factory had been easy, yet now I was trapped inside, and I wanted only to glide out into the churning freedom of the storm outside. I tried again and again, but I felt my airy form growing heavier and denser, and soon I stood on the gore-slick factory floor.