Just for fun, I thought I might do a mash-up featuring some of my favorite characters, Gon, Dixon Peters, and Doc Wormwood. I don't have a title for this yet. Maybe you can help me come up with one!
Chapter 1: The Shamus
My name is Dixon Peters -- go
ahead, laugh. I’m a private eye, a dick, a gumshoe. Some people call me the
supernatural shamus. I’ve even been described as the premier private
investigator of the supernatural world. As such, I’ve dealt with my fair share
of bogeymen and poltergeists, but if there’s one thing that creeps me out more
than anything else in the grimy little corner of the universe I’ve set up shop
in, it’s vampires.
For one thing, they’re dead. Cold
and dead and slimy, with skin as smooth and hard as marble. Imagine going to
some fancy museum and stopping for a moment to admire a Greek statue, and
suddenly the eyes in that statue roll over to look at you, and the thing’s face
twitches, cheeks plumping up, lips splitting open, revealing a set of very
white and very sharp teeth. That’s what it’s like the first time you see a
vampire. It’s an affront. It’s the bright candy wrapping of the universe
splitting open to reveal a rotten core of squirming maggots.
Their eyes seem to suck up any source
of light in the room, glinting at you like lanterns. They move in ways that are
inexpressibly inhuman, staying too motionless for too long before blinking
forward into a new position, their limbs arranged in ways that are subtly
abnormal. Sometimes they forget to breathe, or they talk too loud and make your
ears throb in pain, and their laughter… its like fingernails down a chalkboard.
Werewolves I get. Wizards and
witches… well, technically I am one. I’ve dealt with enough demons in my day
that I don’t even bat an eye. But vampires… ugh!
Give me a rampaging Elder God any day of the week.
The vampire I was currently chasing
through this dirty alley in the Borough called himself the Marquis. Rumor had
it he was the Marquis Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, a French aristocrat
famed for his libertine philosophies and a whole lot of pornographic writings.
Born in 1740. Died in 1814. Still kicking around in Dunsany, Massachusetts in
October of 1934, 120 years later.
How he ended up in Dunsany is
anybody’s guess, but I’d been hired by a crazy old bastard named Hiram Wormwood
to find him, and that’s exactly what I’d done.
Now I just needed to catch him.
Doc Wormwood (that’s what he asked
me to call him) believed de Sade had murdered one of his friends, an old lawman
from out west named Bill Starr. I had tracked the bloodsucker down to a
nightclub called the Scarlet Letter, only the letter on the sign was a big swirly
V instead of an A, like in the story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I just intended to
have a look at him, ask him a few questions, see what kind of vibe I got from
him, but the creepy ess-oh-bee took off as soon as he laid eyes on me, and it
was all I could do to keep up with him as he raced through the backstreets and
alleys of my adopted hometown, climbing walls and jumping over moving cars like
a kid jumps over mud puddles. A normal human being wouldn’t have a chance of
keeping up with the creature, but here’s the thing: I ain’t no normal human
being.
Now don’t get me wrong. I ain’t no
super-man. In every way but one, I am just a below average specimen of the
mammalian species currently claiming proprietorship of this ball of mud and
water we call planet Earth. I’m ugly, getting a little soft around the middle,
getting a little gray in the whiskers (and just recently, in my Adam’s patch,
which is one of the more depressing things I’ve had to deal with recently), and
I drink and smoke just a little too much to be running after some critter that
don’t seem to have to obey the laws of physics.
But I’m also an Umbra, which is a
subspecies of Homo sapiens that is able to give those aforementioned laws of
physics a little nudge.
You call it magic.
Well, there’s one other thing
that’s unusual about me – or maybe I should say two other things – but it’s not
really pertinent to my current situation.
Up ahead, the Marquis de Sade,
dressed in a ridiculously outdated red brocade justaucorps and lace jabot,
twisted around to look at me and then leapt onto the wall at the end of the
alley.
He leapt straight up, just a little
more than two stories in height. Rather than bounce off the bare brick wall, as
any normal human being would do, the Marquis clung lizard-like to the wall and
scurried rapidly upwards, pedaling his feet in a comical manner.
(I don’t know how vampires stick to
walls like they do, whether it’s magic or some strange property of their skin,
but it looked like his feet couldn’t hang onto the wall with those jackboots
on.)
He went up, up and vanished over
the ledge of the roof about five stories above. Took him all of six seconds to
make the climb.
Damn
it!
I had been using my modest Umbra
talents to keep pace with him, speeding myself up just a little faster than
normal so that I could move as quickly as the vampire -- basically, compressing
my lifespan into a much smaller space of time – but I dispersed the magic spell
as soon as I lost sight of my quarry. No sense burning up my allotted span if
it wasn’t going to get me any closer to him.
I needed to find out which way he
was going.
As I couldn’t climb walls like some
sticky-footed gecko, I did the next best thing. I Ghosted.
Astral projection. It’s one of the
few Umbra tricks I’m actually good at. Well, that and jinxing the magic of
other Umbra like me. I could astral project before I even knew what an Umbra
was, though back then I thought they were dreams, or that I was crazy and just
imagining all of it. Later, after Magus Grimberg took me under his wing and
tried to train me, we found out astral projection was the only thing I had any
real aptitude for. I couldn’t summon. I couldn’t teleport. I couldn’t read
minds or shape-shift or turn invisible. All I could do was fly, but that was
good enough for me. It took away some of the sting of discovering that I was in
almost every other way a complete failure as an Umbra.
The instant the Marquis vanished
from sight, I skidded to a halt and closed my eyes. Muttering a quick
incantation under my breath, I shot up out of my body like a rocket.
The world looks very different in
the astral plane. In the astral plane, everything scintillates inside its own
little corona of energy. You call them
auras. Human beings, in the astral plane, are bright, sparkling, multi-hued
beings, while inanimate objects flicker dimly. You can tell a human’s
disposition by the color of his aura, too. Yellow is for happy, pink is love,
red is for anger, blue despair. I don’t know if the colors are really there, or
if that’s just how my untethered soul perceives its surroundings, but it’s not
just handy when you’re trying to catch a suspect, it’s a feast for the soul.
Everything has its own unique pattern
of wavering energy, like a person’s fingerprints. Buildings, trees, that rat
scrounging in the garbage, the wet clothes hanging on the lines strung across
the alley… everything glows.
Everything except vampires.
Vampires are like black holes, the
theoretical sinkholes in the skin of the universe. Not only do they not emit
any light, they seem to draw in the energy of everything around them, sucking
it in like animated sponges. They drink the light like they drink human blood.
The encircling buildings fell
rapidly around me. I flew up, free of gravity’s shackles, invisible, relishing
the sensation of flight, as I have always relished it. Turning slowly in the
air, I cast about for the bloodsucker, saw the creature racing quickly in the
other direction, a churning shadow. He had jumped to the roof of the adjacent
building, was trying to double back.
Amateur!
And then he started climbing down…
behind my paralyzed body!
About five minutes too late, I
realized the Marquis wasn’t trying to run away from me. He had led me into a
trap!
Typical vampire hunting strategy: lead
your victim to a secluded area, somewhere you can dispatch them without threat
of discovery, feed on them, then dispose of the body. People go missing all the
time. It’s vampires.
I fell as quickly as I had risen,
dropping into my body like a big rock chucked into a bucket. My knees buckled
and I farted. Disoriented, I tried desperately to reconnect with my nerve
endings in time to cast a protective spell. I stumbled around like a drunk,
bringing my hands up defensively, but the vampire was on me before I could
uncross my eyes.
He tackled me hard, drove me into a
nearby dumpster. Garbage spilled around us as we slid across the ground.
“Why do you pursue me, Umbra fool?”
he hissed, his fingers digging into the muscles of my shoulders.
His cold breath smelled like copper
and spoiled meat. His eyes were black pits rimmed in vermillion. De Sade was 74
years old when he died, but he looked 174. Face sagging like unbaked dough. Talcum
clumped in the wrinkles of his flesh. He had rouged his cheeks, lined his eyes
in black and his lips in red, but it just made him look like a clown. An old,
ugly, perverse clown.
“I need… to ask you… some
questions,” I gasped, turning my face from that horrid breath.
“Questions?” the vampire cried, and
he laughed incredulously. He said something quickly in French, probably some
scornful declaration of disbelief, then pressed his face close to mine once
more. “You forfeit your life to ask me some questions?”
“Why did you kill Bill Starr?” I spat.
“Bill Starr is dead?” the Marquis
said, pushing away from me in surprise. His red-rimmed eyes narrowed. His wormy
lips curled back from his fangs. “I would like to believe you are lying, but I
can smell that you are not. How did Bill Starr die, and why do you think I
killed him?”
“I don’t believe it, my client
does,” I said. I wriggled beneath the creature, trying to push myself out from
under him with my elbows. A banana peel fell across my face and I batted it
away.
“And who is that?” the Marquis
asked. He felt me twisting beneath him and grinned. He arched an eyebrow and
began to subtly grind his ass against my groin.
“Stop that!” I snarled, and he
tittered, chin to his chest, a bony finger pressed to his lips.
“Pardon! You Americans are so repressed! But who hired you to find
me? Who believes I killed Bill Starr?” he asked.
“His friend. Hiram Wormwood.”
“Senility,” de Sade said
dismissively. “The mortal is almost as old as I!”
“So you deny it?”
“Of course I do. I was quite
enchanted by the giant American. So tall and rugged. So… virtuous. I even offered to give him the Strix. I offered him
immortality in exchange for a single night of passion, but he refused. I was
disappointed, of course, but not enough to harm him. I would never harm him.
Not willingly. Not unless he asked me to.”
“Any idea who might have wanted him
dead?” I asked.
The Marquis grinned insouciantly.
“Perhaps…”
“Who?”
He started to answer.
Before he bent his tongue to the
name, the smelly French vampire twisted violently around. He looked to the
mouth of the alley and cursed under his breath. “Merde!” An instant later, he vanished. The speed of his departure
rippled my clothes, sent the garbage around me flapping in breezy loop-de-loops.
A man in sleek black modern clothes
stepped into the alley. He had long, slightly curly auburn hair and a light
beard, pale skin and glinting hazel eyes.
Another vampire!
Clambering to my feet, I reached
into my pocket and retrieved the gadget the Doc had given me. I hadn’t been
able to use it on the Marquis, but I wasn’t giving this bloodsucker a chance to
get the drop on me.
“Stop right there!” I shouted,
pulling the gizmo from my pocket and aiming it at the thing. I tried to cock it
like the Doc had shown me. The mechanism was stubborn, hadn’t been used in a
long time. Finally, with a metallic snap, two fins popped out of the sides of
the device, armed with little silver darts. “The poison in these darts can, uh,
decouple the molecular bonds of the symbiote that resides within you.”
I frowned. I was pretty sure that’s
what the Doc had said it would do. Something like that anyway.
The vampire eyed my weapon with
great interest. His nostrils flared and then he dismissed it. His glinting
green eyes flicked up to mine.
“Be at ease, mortal. I mean you no
harm,” the vampire said. His voice was deep and mellifluous, with just the
faintest hint of a European accent. “We have a common enemy, you and I, though
I do not believe you know who that enemy truly is. Not yet anyway.”
“And you are?” I asked, lowering
the Doc’s gizmo.
The creature smiled faintly and
bowed at the waist. “I am Gon, the world’s oldest living vampire.”
Let me know what you think about it so far!
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