The Cross. Scott G. Mariani

blood congealed in his veins as a sound echoed softly in the darkness. He froze, afraid to breathe.

      Then he heard the sound again. A low cackle from the shadows.

      And a dark shape detached itself from the pillar just steps away, and came towards him. As it stepped into the glow of the firelight, he saw it clearly. The hands reaching out for him. The predatory glint in the thing’s eyes. The white fangs in its gaping mouth.

      Dec stumbled back, raising the crucifix. ‘Get back, vampire!’ His yell came out as a choked whimper, barely audible.

      The thing kept on coming. Dec screamed as he felt its hands clutching his arm.

      It was shaking him.

      Saying his name.

      ‘Dec. Dec. Wake up.’

      Dec snapped his eyes open with a gasp and jerked bolt upright in the bed, staring wild-eyed at the person standing over him. But it wasn’t a vampire. It was his ma, still gently holding on to his arm. And he wasn’t in the crypt at Crowmoor Hall, but at home in his bedroom in the suburban safety of Lavender Close, Wallingford.

      ‘You were having a bad dream, son,’ his ma said.

      ‘Jesus,’ Dec said, rubbing his eyes. He smiled weakly. ‘I’m all right.’

      ‘Oh, Dec, you didn’t sleep in your clothes,’ his ma groaned. ‘Again? Is this what you are now, a slob?’

      Dec glanced down at himself, and saw he had, shoes and all. He shrugged. ‘Sorry, Ma.’

      ‘I brought you some tea.’ His ma motioned at the steaming drink she’d set down on his bedside table. She’d made it in his favourite mug, the Spiderman one.

      Dec reached over and picked it up gratefully. ‘Thanks, Ma.’ He slurped at the steaming hot tea, the vividness of the nightmare still lingering in his mind. Glancing at his watch, he saw it was after eight.

      ‘I see you’ve taken to wearing your cross again,’ his ma said approvingly, pointing at the little gold crucifix that hung on a chain from his neck. She’d bought it for his confirmation, but it had lain forgotten in a drawer until very recently. Dec touched it and nodded as he slurped more tea.

      His ma walked over to the window and jerked open the curtains, letting in the grey morning light. She peered out across Lavender Close, then tutted irritably. ‘Look at that. They’re back again.’

      ‘Who’s back again? Not the police, is it?’

      She shook her head. ‘Them bloody reporters. For next door.’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘They should leave folks alone, so they should. As if those poor Hawthornes haven’t suffered enough.’

      Dec made no reply. The nightmare of his dreams was gone now. Only the nightmare that was reality remained.

      His ma turned away from the window and headed for the door. ‘So are you getting up or are you going to lie there all day?’ she said on her way out of the room. ‘Your da needs you at the garage.’ Dec’s da was the boss of Maddon Auto Services in Wallingford, where Dec did a few hours’ spanner-wielding each week.

      ‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ Dec groaned, wincing at the idea of having to go into work today. When he heard his mother’s footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs, he fought the covers off him with his fists and feet, clambered out of bed and went to the window. The sight of the TV van and the reporter’s car in the street outside, both parked outside the gate of Number 16 next door, filled him with anger.

      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