tooth!’
‘Impossible,’ said Jack.
‘Really. Look!’
Her nipple was bleeding.
‘She’s a vampire,’ said Jack.
Gingerly Katherine put her back to the nipple.
‘ Ow!! ’
She pulled her away again, whispered an affectionate ‘No!’ in her ear and then put her back.
Judith did not bite a third time.
‘If she’s a vampire she’s learning fast not to be,’ she said.
They went back to the house, their moment of sharing feeling like respite.
It was, but it didn’t last long.
Half an hour later Judith began screaming again.
9
A WAKENING
F our hundred miles to the east, across the North Sea, far beneath the surface of the Earth, a mortal form lay cocooned in a nineteenth-century dentist’s chair of rusting iron and mildewed leather.
Around him in the terrible dark were the chair’s accoutrements: flexible tubes, drills on leads, an extending spittoon, a cast-iron footrest, a treadle to turn the wires that turn the wheels that turn the drills, and counterweights.
Leather straps with buckles hung loose from the chair by his hands and arms, ankles and legs, adjacent to his chest and up by his head. As if, sometime in the past, the chair had been a place of horrible restraint and might yet be again.
This antique assemblage was in the centre of a rock-bound Chamber so vast that it could have accommodated a human Gothic cathedral.
There was no light, none at all.
Only darkness palpable.
Had explorers found themselves on the threshold of this lost place and tried to penetrate the dark with the darting beams of their torches, the dreadful chair and its ghastly occupant would not have been immediately obvious.
They would first have been lulled by a sense of wonderment. For one thing, an endless drip, drip, drip of subterranean rain fell from the rocky shadows of the Chamber’s roof. It created a swirling mistiness driven by strong draughts and sudden winds.
Then there were the strange unnerving objects that were scattered like ghosts across the vast, uneven floor.
The Chamber was human-made. It had been used as a sorting floor for grading coal and rock. The machinery for these operations had been left behind when the mine was abandoned, along with a host of wheels, derricks and chains, rail tracks, hawsers, giant tools and trolleys. Over time every single thing had been covered by thick layers of rock-hard lime deposited by the continuous ‘rain’. These secretions had turned the objects into swollen versions of their former selves, some still identifiable, many not.
There were piles of pit props, massive spanners, a bucket, rectangular tanks, a table and three chairs and even a pit engine standing on its old track, complete with boiler, funnel and driver’s cabin, all subsumed beneath deposits of lime.
Only when the explorers had passed through these unnerving relics, stumbling and slipping on the slimy floor, would they have found their lights fixed finally on the dentist’s chair protected from the rain by a sloping canopy that kept it dry. Even then, they would have had to go very near to comprehend the appalling nature of the thing they had found.
It was a hydden, his wasted flesh mottled with decay; his muscles and sinews so twisted by disuse and shrinkage that his limbs and joints had contorted beyond any recognition of who and what he had once been; his teeth were discoloured and rotten, his hair, once sleek and blond, had thinned into transparency and was so matted with filth that it formed a cakey plaster on his scalp.
Yet he was not dead.
This ruination of a living thing lying helpless in a chair made for humans was Slaeke Sinistral I, Emperor of the Hyddenworld, most powerful hydden who ever lived, progenitor of the Empire and all its works, once a son, a spouse, a lover and a friend.
It was age that had struck him down, and that he was still alive at all seemed a miracle. The records clearly showed that he was over one hundred and sixty years old when he was
‘Impossible,’ said Jack.
‘Really. Look!’
Her nipple was bleeding.
‘She’s a vampire,’ said Jack.
Gingerly Katherine put her back to the nipple.
‘ Ow!! ’
She pulled her away again, whispered an affectionate ‘No!’ in her ear and then put her back.
Judith did not bite a third time.
‘If she’s a vampire she’s learning fast not to be,’ she said.
They went back to the house, their moment of sharing feeling like respite.
It was, but it didn’t last long.
Half an hour later Judith began screaming again.
9
A WAKENING
F our hundred miles to the east, across the North Sea, far beneath the surface of the Earth, a mortal form lay cocooned in a nineteenth-century dentist’s chair of rusting iron and mildewed leather.
Around him in the terrible dark were the chair’s accoutrements: flexible tubes, drills on leads, an extending spittoon, a cast-iron footrest, a treadle to turn the wires that turn the wheels that turn the drills, and counterweights.
Leather straps with buckles hung loose from the chair by his hands and arms, ankles and legs, adjacent to his chest and up by his head. As if, sometime in the past, the chair had been a place of horrible restraint and might yet be again.
This antique assemblage was in the centre of a rock-bound Chamber so vast that it could have accommodated a human Gothic cathedral.
There was no light, none at all.
Only darkness palpable.
Had explorers found themselves on the threshold of this lost place and tried to penetrate the dark with the darting beams of their torches, the dreadful chair and its ghastly occupant would not have been immediately obvious.
They would first have been lulled by a sense of wonderment. For one thing, an endless drip, drip, drip of subterranean rain fell from the rocky shadows of the Chamber’s roof. It created a swirling mistiness driven by strong draughts and sudden winds.
Then there were the strange unnerving objects that were scattered like ghosts across the vast, uneven floor.
The Chamber was human-made. It had been used as a sorting floor for grading coal and rock. The machinery for these operations had been left behind when the mine was abandoned, along with a host of wheels, derricks and chains, rail tracks, hawsers, giant tools and trolleys. Over time every single thing had been covered by thick layers of rock-hard lime deposited by the continuous ‘rain’. These secretions had turned the objects into swollen versions of their former selves, some still identifiable, many not.
There were piles of pit props, massive spanners, a bucket, rectangular tanks, a table and three chairs and even a pit engine standing on its old track, complete with boiler, funnel and driver’s cabin, all subsumed beneath deposits of lime.
Only when the explorers had passed through these unnerving relics, stumbling and slipping on the slimy floor, would they have found their lights fixed finally on the dentist’s chair protected from the rain by a sloping canopy that kept it dry. Even then, they would have had to go very near to comprehend the appalling nature of the thing they had found.
It was a hydden, his wasted flesh mottled with decay; his muscles and sinews so twisted by disuse and shrinkage that his limbs and joints had contorted beyond any recognition of who and what he had once been; his teeth were discoloured and rotten, his hair, once sleek and blond, had thinned into transparency and was so matted with filth that it formed a cakey plaster on his scalp.
Yet he was not dead.
This ruination of a living thing lying helpless in a chair made for humans was Slaeke Sinistral I, Emperor of the Hyddenworld, most powerful hydden who ever lived, progenitor of the Empire and all its works, once a son, a spouse, a lover and a friend.
It was age that had struck him down, and that he was still alive at all seemed a miracle. The records clearly showed that he was over one hundred and sixty years old when he was
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