An exploration of Majesty...

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

So, I saw this film a while ago. Not that good a film, really. I only went to see it because Angelina Jolie was in it and I heard she had her tits on display. Bloody thing turned out to be some kind of computer animation. Yeah, that’s bloody sexy, isn’t it?

Anyway, I sat through it. Beowulf, it were called. All about a bunch of blokes who went monster hunting; chasing after some twisted fuck called ‘Grendel’. Looked sort of human, but wasn’t. A fucked up, freaky, killing thing that lived in the night. I got to admit, I sort of liked that. You see, I’m a monster hunter, you might say. Don’t bother asking about the back story, because I ain’t going to give it. It’s long and it’s complicated and it ain’t the point. How about you just accept that there’s shit out that that you don’t want to think about, that all that horror movie bullshit is a bit more real than you’d like to admit and that I’m one of the geezers who’s job it is to stand between nice ordinary people like you and the monsters; the freaky shit that comes out of the night; the bad things that happen to good people.

It’s my job to stand between you and the Grendel.

I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying I ain’t lost friends doing it, and fuck me, I’ve thought my number was up before. I’ve seen shit that would make your bloody curdle. Of course, the funny thing is that it’s never the shit you expect to freak you out that does. You wouldn’t have thought the scariest thing in the world would be a pretty little girl with bare feet, would you?

Thought not.

And yeah. I will tell you this story.

So, it happens a couple of weeks ago. Me and some blokes I know have been working in York. We found a nest of vampires – yes, they do exist – and been tracking them for months. Nasty pieces of work, vampires. Don’t believe the Twilight bullshit. Real vampires don’t sparkle. Real vampires are sharp and cruel and every single last motherfucking one of them is a killer. The nice ones will maybe have one or two dead bodies in their closet – that little ‘feeding accident’ or the witness who just had to vanish quietly. The nasty ones? Well, the nasty ones make Jeffery Dahmer look like a fucking pussy cat. They take Freddy Krueger and Dr Mengele and make them look like amateurs and, what’s more, like amateurs who don’t really enjoy their work.

A vampire, I have found, always enjoys his work.

And the vampires in York are definitely in the ‘nasty’ category.

We didn’t know much about the nest although bits and pieces came floating out. We found a corpse here, occasionally a traumatized survivor there. God help us, we found eighteen bodies clogging up a weir back before Christmas. The one thing we had managed to get hold of were some of their meeting places, and through that we got a bunch of license plates. And, most important of all, we got the license plate for the bloodsucking motherfucker that we had a feeling was behind it all.

We didn’t know much about him. We had a few pictures – a face like a skull, teeth like razors, and the kind of smile that’s a horror movie in by itself. We didn’t know where he lived, any of that shit. We didn’t even have a name. I called him ‘Grendel’. Yeah, I know it sounds poncy, but it seemed to fit.

Anyway, so, three weeks back we decide to make our move. We had Grendel’s face, his license plate, and we knew that the nest was gathering on a Saturday night. We knew roughly where he’d be travelling from and we reckoned we could make a pretty clean kill of it. And, all things considered, we were feeling pretty good about it. We were going to go out, kick ass, kill a bad guy.

And you know what? We were morons.

It all started at 20:00 hours. We had a car licence plate, and a rough idea of what route he'd be likely to take. Actually, we had three likely routes and traps laid down on all three. Glass in the road, set deep and solidly into concrete smeared between cobblestones, sticking up sharp enough to slice car tires. One sniper up in a first floor window, which belonged to a flat where the owners were away on holiday and me. The point man. The guy with the gun, or crossbow in this case. Guns don't do so much to vampires. Bit of wood through the heart on the other hand, can knock them down in one. Yeah, go figure. It doesn't make much sense to me either. But then the world is fucked up. I never worked out how werewolves manage to change shape. Where does all the extra mass go?

Anyway, I'm in the car. I've got a crossbow, and I know I'm pretty fucking good with it. I'm waiting and I'm waiting and I poised to go, and then round the corner he comes.

He was travelling in a big fuck off armoured car. Not so well armoured that we couldn't get into it, and we'd got rocks and molotovs prepped for that very reason, but still, it was big and black and screamed 'fuck me, I'm important'. It came round the corner slowly, and carefully, driven by someone who wanted to keep the drive smooth, and then, like a dream, went sliding across the glass we'd laid out. I think it hit them at just the right angle, because there was a bang as the left front tire blew out and the car came skidding to a halt.

It sat in the road, dead still, for a moment. I've no idea what the people inside were thinking. Fuck, at the time I had no idea who might be inside the car. We reckoned a driver, who could be taken out with a quick bullet, and we knew that Grendel had this girl he'd been seen with of late. I didn't know much about her, but the limited intel we got back suggested she wouldn't be much of a threat. Still, we were ready.

We waited for a few moments, and then the back door to the car opened and someone got out.

Like I said, real vampires don't sparkle.

I'd seen pictures of our bloodsucker before, but never seen him in the flesh. He was tall and rake thin, with bones pushing at his ash grey skin. He had a baseball cap pulled down low over his face, but when he opened his mouth to snap something back inside the car - "stay inside", perhaps - his teeth were like needles in his mouth. His lips were thin and his jaw line was as sharp as a blade. The back of his neck was stained with dirt and grime, and there was a splash of dirty bloody brown at the corner of his mouth. He moved with a slow loping gait, like a dog or a wolf, his shoulders hunched as he moved.

There was a flicker of movement in the car, and for an instant I thought I caught a glimpse of a pale face, with huge dark eyes. Girl, I thought, looking to be maybe nineteen or twenty. Then she moved and was lost inside the darkness of the car. No matter, we could get her later.

Grendel knelt down beside the wheel, looking at it with an expression which I couldn't read. Fuck, not even the man's emotions were human anymore. Then he half stood up, as if to give another order. And that was when we moved.

I put my foot on the accelerator. The car jerked forward, sliding a little on the cobbles as I fought to control it with one hand on the steering wheel, the other lifting the crossbow. Grendel turned to face me, and for the first time I saw his eyes, black as pitch, burning from beneath his hat. Then, for a second, he was distracted. Fuck knows why, but he looked back to the car and snarled "run," at whatever was inside the car. And that gave me the opening I needed.

Bang.

My bolt was in his chest.

Now, if I'd been lucky, he'd have gone down then. I wasn't, and instead it just stuck there, and he turned back to me. For a moment neither of us moved, and then those thin bloodless lips pulled back into a snarl and he started to run towards me. I managed to get off another shot. It stuck in his chest, not doing anything, and that was when I started to panic. I put my foot on the accelerator, just wanting to get the fuck out of dodge now. We'd taken our shot and I sure as fuck wasn't going to go toe to toe with something that can take two bolts from a top of the range killing crossbow in the chest without it even slowing the fucker down.

And you know what? He just sped up to match my speed.

I was not going slow. I accelerated up to 50 mph, bumping over the cobbles, hearing the suspension judder, and something somewhere snap. He just got faster, limbs moving in a way that no bloody human ever has. He bounced off a wall, then up into the air for a second, landing in a low snarling crouch right in front of me. No way could I stop in time. I didn't even have time to spin the wheel. Instead I went smashing straight into him.

The fucker didn't even move.

There was a crunching noise as my bullbars hit his shoulder. He didn't shift. I managed to get my foot off the accelerator, and thanked my lucky stars that the engine was still running, although the airbag on the drivers side had burst open, spraying me with that white powder you get with it. There was a smell of petrol coming from somewhere, and I was sure as fuck hoping it wasn't coming from my engine, but knew my odds weren't good.

He didn't move for an instant and then stood away, his neck cracking as he stretched and his mouth widening into a smile, to show off all those daggers for teeth. Fuck me, two of them had grown even longer, fangs running down over his jaw like a sabretooth. He was going to kill me. He wasn't going to fuck around with jedi mind tricks, or blood that twists the emotions, or even a bit of nice simple threatening. He was going to kill me, and from the look in his eyes, it wasn't even going to be a quick death.

And, for a moment, it was like the whole world stood still. Everything seemed strangely clear. I didn't feel panicked, or afraid and my brain was working with this amazing and perfect clarity.

He was going to kill me. I was going to die. I had one chance, one last little tiny chance to save myself.

And somehow, my hand didn't even shake as I lifted the crossbow.

Bang!

The bolt hit Grendel in the chest at close range, with a force which would have knocked an elephant backwards. Grendel didn't move. He just kept grinning at me, with those horrible sharp teeth. For a moment, I thought he was going to move towards me, then he seemed to notice the crossbow bolt in his chest. He frowned and looked down at it, seeming almost surprised to see it there, which was a bit bloody peculiar as he already had another two in his chest.

Then he looked back up at me, still frowning, and just toppled slowly over.

I'd done it! We'd done it! We'd killed Grendel.

Well, we'd got him down anyway. Vampires, you see, don't die that easy. A crossbow bolt in the chest will put them down, but it won't kill them. You need to go that one step further. Some people say that decapitation is all that will do. I find that once they go down, then a few more high calibre bullets in the brain seem to finish them off nicely. And, luckily for me, I happened to have a high calibre hand gun with me in the glove compartment. Illegal as fuck, but who cares when it's going to save your life against some blood sucker than PC Plod is not going to able to deal with.

I was fucking euphoric, adrenaline still running through my veins, as I wound the window down with my gun in hand to take that final shot.

That was when I heard the 'clunk' of the car door shutting. Not my car. The other car. Grendel's car. Someone was getting out of it. I hadn't expected that, so I looked back down the street.

And that was when I realized that I had forgotten one very important part of the story of Grendel.

See, it wasn't Grendel that Beowulf really needed to be afraid of. Grendel got taken down, fell before sword and steel. He died, and Beowulf got to be the hero. But that's not the ending to that story.

No, the monster that Beowulf had to fear was Grendel's mother.

There was a girl standing in the street. First of all, I'm going to be honest. Describing her now, you won't understand why I was so shit scared. She wasn't tall; Grendel had been about 6'2", Grendel's mother was maybe 5'4". She wasn't heavily built, and didn't have the whip thing muscle tone Grendel had had. Rather, she was small and softly curved in all the right places. And fuck me, she was beautiful. Not sexy. Not gorgeous. Downright beautiful. In another world I'd have followed her home just to be allowed to hold her fucking hand. Her hair was dark and fell in this wave down her back. Her skin was very pale, and her eyes were very dark and she walked with the grace of a cat.

She was also the most terrifying thing I have ever seen in my life.

Look, I know it don't make sense. It makes sense that I was scared of Grendel. He was a monster with fuck off giant fangs who was about to kill me. Grendel's mother was a gorgeous bit of skirt who I should have wanted to take home for a good seeing to. If I shagged bloodsuckers. Which I don't.

And she was really clearly a blood sucker.

You could tell from the pallor of her skin, from the way the blue veins at her throat and temples stood out. You could tell from the way that she made no noise at all when she moved, and from the way that her eyes stayed fixed on me, utterly unblinking.

You could tell she wasn't human. If nothing else, those eyes alone would have told you, and it was those eyes that told me now to be afraid.

She kept walking towards me. My back up on the roof should have dealt with her, should have put a bullet into her, or lobbed a molotov at her.

A thin trickle of smoke from the upstairs room where he had been sitting suggested to me that the molotov he had prepared was not going to be coming her way. Jesus, how had that happened? How had he not managed to throw a simple fucking molotov?

I looked at her again, looked at those black eyes, and suddenly it didn't seem very implausible at all. I would burn myself rather than let petrol and flame touch that perfect white skin. I would throw myself on someone else's fucking molotov and oh god what was she doing to me?

I looked back at Grendel, lying on the ground.

This was my one chance to kill him, to take him out. Fuck knows how many lives I'd save, how much harm I'd stop just with that single bullet.

I looked back at Grendel's mother. She was close now, maybe 5' away. She held my gaze for a long while and the faintest flicker of a smile drifted across her face and I swear, she knew exactly what I was thinking. She shook her head, just a little, with maybe a small moue of disappointment on her lips now. And suddenly I couldn't. I couldn't because I was afraid of her, I couldn't because I wanted to not disappoint her. I couldn't because I just knew that whatever she did to me if I did was make Grendel's plans pale into insignificance and I couldn't because at that moment, the thought of doing anything other than either running away or falling to my knees in front of her and begging for forgiveness was just inconceivable.

She was beautiful. Cold as ice, and cruel as a blizzard. You could see that in her eyes. But she was beautiful.

We stood, unmoving, eyes locked, for what felt like a really long time. God help me, I don't think I wanted that moment to end. I was about as fucking terrified as I've ever been in my whole life, but I didn't want it to end. I just wanted to stay there, with her, for as long as I could. I think she saw that in me and she tilted her head to one side a little. One hand moved, and I knew if she held her hand out to me, I'd be gone.

I don't want to be bitch-boy to some bloodsucking freakshow.

So I managed to get the car into reverse and my foot on the accelerator again. For one fucking terrifying moment I thought that the car wouldn't start, that I'd totally fucked the engine by smashing into Grendel. Then, with a horrible screaming and grinding noise, it jerked back, away from Grendel, away from Grendel's mother.

In the rear view mirror I saw her standing there. She didn't move. She just stood there, delicate, perfect and malevolent, as my car rounded the corner and sped out of sight.

I've not seen her or Grendel again since. But I lock my door before I got to sleep at night and I keep having dreams about them. Sometimes they are nightmares, where I see Grendel's skull face, and dagger teeth leering out of the darkness. Sometimes they aren't nightmares. Sometimes I see her again; the smooth pale skin, those huge dark eyes. Sometimes she's there, holding out a hand to me, and I don't have to strength to walk away.

Sometimes I dream about what it would be like to touch her.

Those are the worst dreams of all.

Comments

[twicedead.livejournal.com]

Where does all the extra mass go?

Heh.

I really, really like this story. Great voice, different to your usual voice and just so very, very good at looking at the vampires from outside.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I know I totally nicked the 'extra mass' line from JTD. It has stuck in my head for many years. :)

It's a good line!

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

This is bloody brilliant; I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I enjoyed writing it as well. It's been sitting in my head since the last Yorkfield game. It just took forever to get out. I think there's a Ruth-pov sequel as well but I don't know when I'll write that.