I reached the top of the stairs and looked right and left. No Screechers on the landing. I went into the bedrooms, one by one, switching on the lights. I opened the wardrobes and looked under the beds. No Screechers here either.
I nudged open the bathroom door. There was a huge black spider halfway up the side of the bath, but no Screechers.
Maybe the police officers had been hallucinating. Maybe I had been hearing things.
I was just about to go back downstairs when I heard a sharp shifting sound right above my head. I looked up and saw a trapdoor, and finger marks on the white ceiling all around it. That’s where they were: in the attic. The noise of springs and clicking must have been a loft ladder coming down.
This was going to be difficult. I would have to pull down the loft ladder to get into the attic, so there was no chance of my taking them by surprise, and as soon as I stuck my head through the trapdoor they would tear my face off. There was only one way to deal with them, so far as I could see, and that was to seal them in the attic so that they couldn’t get out — at least until I had thought of a way of rousting them out of there and killing them.
I went into the main bedroom and carried out an antique wooden chair, which I positioned directly underneath the trapdoor. Out of my Kit I took a large ball of yellow wax, and two full heads of garlic. The wax had once formed part of a death mask of St. Francis of Assisi, and I had used it several times before to prevent strigoi mortii from sliding out through narrow gaps around windows and doors.
I rolled a large lump of wax between the palms of my hands until it was warm and soft. Then I climbed up on to the chair and started to press it into the crack around the edge of the attic door.
I had only filled in a few inches when I heard a loud scrape, and a clatter. Before I could jump down from the chair, the trapdoor was pulled upward, and a staring-eyed man in a gray suit appeared, his gray hair sticking up as if he had been walking through a hurricane. He lunged down and seized my wrists, trying to drag me upward. I kicked and struggled, and the chair tipped sideways, so that I was left in the air with my feet furiously pedaling.
Another man reached down and grabbed my left sleeve. My shirt tore, but he got a grip on my elbow. Between the two of them, the Screechers started to haul me upward through the trapdoor, scraping my shoulders on the wooden frame. It was dark inside the attic, but I could see five or six more of them, including two women, and they all came clustering around me, snatching at my shirt and pulling at my hair. I saw knives shining, and I suddenly felt a sharp wet cut across my knuckles, and another one across my forehead.
Christ, they were going to cut me open and drink my blood, and there were enough of them in this attic to drink me dry.
I realized then that they were too strong for me, and that they were going to pull me up into the attic no matter how hard I struggled. So I stopped kicking and swinging my legs, and instead of trying to wrench myself free, I took hold of the gray man’s coat and hauled myself upward.
The Screechers were all pulling me so hard that I almost jumped up into the attic, and the gray man lost his balance and fell backward. I rolled over and rolled over again, colliding with a stack of suitcases and knocking over an old standard lamp, but as I rolled over the second time I was able to reach behind me and pull out my gun.
The gray man was practically on top of me, so close that my nostrils were filled with the sweet smell of his rotting insides. I pointed the gun at his face and fired, and even in the semidarkness I could see a large lump of his head fly off, including his ear. He fell sideways on top of the suitcases, his heels drumming on the floorboards like a stricken horse.
I fired again. The noise of the shot made my ears ring, and the attic was filled with gunsmoke. I fired a third time, and one of the women Screechers fell backward and toppled through the open trapdoor. A fourth shot brought down another man — and even though their knives were raised, the rest of the Screechers hesitated. They knew that I couldn’t kill them, even if I blew bits off their heads, but they weren’t impervious to pain, and even Screechers don’t relish disfigurement.
I stood up and approached them, pointing my weapon at each of them in turn. The dim light that came up through the trapdoor showed me what a sorry, hideous collection of lost souls they were — their faces haggard, their clothes caked in dried blood, their eyes milky. They were in the last stages of degradation as strigoi vii, and it wouldn’t be long before they would be craving one final poisonous drink of Duca’s blood — the blood that would transform them forever into strigoi mortii.
From down below I heard shouting. “You all right, sir? What’s the ’ell’s going on?”
“I’ve found your ghosts!” I shouted back. “There’s a woman down there. hold on to her and don’t let her get away!”
I edged toward the open trapdoor, keeping my gun pointed at the Screechers. They were growing bolder now, and one of the women lunged toward me, hissing in contempt, and crisscrossing her knife in the air. I pointed my gun at her head and pulled the trigger but all that I heard was a metallic click. All of my Last Supper bullets had been fired, and the clip was empty.
I didn’t hesitate. I swung myself through the trapdoor and jumped down to the landing below, stumbling over the fallen chair. The woman who had fallen through was already halfway down the stairs, her hair wild and her blue cotton dress spattered with dried blood. The two police officers had just reached the foot of the stairs below her, and they were staring up at her in horror.
“Bloody ’ell, you’ve shot ’er!”
“Stop her! Don’t let her get away!”
The woman threw herself down the stairs toward them, screeching. The officers made a fumbled attempt to hold her, but she flailed her arms and wrenched herself free and ran along the hallway to the open front door.
“There’s another one!” exclaimed one of the officers, pointing to the trapdoor above my head.
Another woman Screecher was climbing out of the attic. She was wearing a green skirt and a stained yellow cardigan. Unlike the first woman, she didn’t drop to the floor. Instead, she crawled upside down along the ceiling, so that her skirt hung down and I could see her laddered stockings and her garter belt. She crawled all the way down the sloping ceiling above the staircase, above our heads — all the way along the hallway ceiling, and out of the front door. We couldn’t have reached her to pull her down to the floor, even if we had had the nerve to do it.
As soon as she had gone, the man in the gray suit appeared in the trapdoor. His hair was sticking up wildly and the left side of his skull looked like broken, bloodstained china. I could see the other Screechers crowding close behind him, and I knew that it was time to get the hell out of here.
I jumped down the stairs, three and four at a time. “Come on, there’s too many of them!”
The man in the gray suit was already crawling across the ceiling, and a balding middle-aged man with liver-spotted hands was following him. There must have been more Screechers in the attic than I had realized, because they came pouring out like spiders, swarming down the walls. I didn’t stop to count them, and neither did the two police officers. I grabbed my Kit from the receptionist’s office and we ran out into the night.
Halfway toward the front gates, one of the officers turned around and drew out his baton. “Right, then!” he said, defiantly. “Let’s see how they like having their ’eads cracked!”
I seized hold of his arm and pulled him away so violently that he almost fell over. “You’re out of your frigging mind! They’ll kill us! Let’s go!”