Whitby Vampyrrhic by Simon Clark

You were the only girl who didn’t make fun of me at school. Listen, I’ve told you this before. Myself, and the other ones, have tried so hard not to feed. If we ingest human blood it speeds the transformation in our bodies. We have tried to resist. But it’s getting difficult. Bodies of sailors are washed up on the beach, the blood still fresh in their veins. It’s this war. It delivers prey to us. We try not to feed on it, but it’s difficult to resist. Sometimes airmen fall out of the sky. It’s like a hungry child, standing in an orchard, with ripe apples dropping from the trees into its hands. Help us, Eleanor, we need you.’
    Don’t do it, don’t do it! You’ve promised yourself you’ll never talk to him.
    But those incessant pleas – ‘Talk to me. Help us.’ – and the power of the sheer sorrow in those words overwhelmed her self-restraint. She set the jar down, then marched to the iron grate. And there he was. Gustav Kirk stood beneath it. His hands clenched about the bars. His bone-white face peered up through the gaps at her. The fierce black pupils locked on hers.
    â€˜You left me in the cave!’
Traitorous mouth
. She’d tried so hard to ignore Gustav all those times before, when he’d crept along the tunnel. ‘You abandoned me to them!’ She flashed the wounds at him. ‘They’ve never healed. So how could I ever marry a man with these marks of damnation?’
    â€˜I didn’t leave you. The candle went out so I had to go get my bag. The matches were there. Eleanor, I saved you.’
    â€˜Saved me for a life of hell, you mean!’
    She fled to the stairs.
    â€˜Eleanor! Help us! We’re going to do something terrible – and we can’t stop ourselves. Eleanor! Don’t go!’

Six
    The milk-white eyes of the Vampiric men and women had adapted well to darkness. And though not so much as a glimmer escaped the houses of Whitby town, these night creatures saw the buildings spread out beneath them perfectly.
    There were six now. They stood in the cliff-top cemetery that overlooked the harbour and the chaotic scatter of tightly clustered rooftops. The pilot rested his hand on a tombstone and realized he’d cheated death once and for all. Mary gazed down at her old home eighty feet beneath her. In her heart of hearts, she knew she’d escaped the drudgery of everyday life. Changes were taking place in both her body and her mind, yet the overriding emotion was one of pleasure. She was free. And she loved that sensation. No more domestic chores. No more being tied to the house. Licks of white, glistening ice formed on the gravestones. Grass became crisp underfoot. Mary’s nightdress still dripped from her fall into the sea. Cold couldn’t reach her now. The crunch of frosted grass against her bare toes didn’t bother her one jot.
    Behind them, the squat, block shape of St Mary’s Church. And behind that lay the ruins of the abbey. This monastic relic consisted of skeletal structures, bereft of a roof, yet containing vast arched openings that had once been the abbey windows. Keen Vampiric eyes glimpsed spiral staircases in the remains of the abbey’s towers, which had once taken the monks that bit closer to heaven; now the broken staircases led to nowhere. Those ferociously sharp eyes also detected subtle mounds in the earth where the ancient Viking temple stood.
    Gustav, even in the days when he was still human, sensed that the old gods had returned to the temple site in the hope that humanity hadn’t forgotten them. But now Odin and his clan were shunned. They hadn’t lingered long, and they’d soon returned to wherever spurned gods dwell. But a yet more ancient deity, the one known as Tiw, was as mysterious and unknowable to the Vikings as it was to modern Man. And Tiw was psychotically tenacious.
    Often Gustav had stood up here in the cliff-top cemetery. In his