Hellsing Fan Fiction ❯ Fare ❯ Horror and Pain ( Chapter 15 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Author's Notes: Next Chapter will be Part two of “Primal Scream! Die Hellsing, Die!”. There will be a part three. Just thought you should know.

The feeling of passing through that black, polished floor was unlike anything she had experienced as a vampire. But it reminded her of human experiences, like diving into an intensely cold pool of water. But it was not an unpleasant cold. It was the soothing chill of cold water running over an angry burn, of ice soothing a sore muscle. Her body complained to her after a moment when she realized that she had, dangerously, stopped moving and had let herself rest inside the stone of the floor, though only for a moment. She willed herself to move the rest of the way and fell through to a chamber below, her landing graceful yet still slightly jarring her bones uncomfortably.

She smelled Malakai in the dark of this place, smelled metal and bleach and blood. When Malakai put his hand gently on her shoulder, she turned to him and saw him staring in horror into the darkness behind her. Alucard dropped silently and slowly, practically floating in his descent. Victoria peered into the darkness (though she could see, she still recognized that it was, in fact, dark) and saw that their room was a small washroom, and that Malakai was staring into the adjoined room.

She stepped forward to have a better look but Malakai's strong hand on her shoulder forcefully restrained her, and she felt that she would certainly have bruises if he increased the strength of his grip even a little. She looked back at his face, concerned, and disliked intensely what she found there. Such horror and pain did not belong on his beloved face. Someone she cared for as family should not wear such an expression. He was biting his lip in that nervous fashion of his, a hand on his chest, and she could not be sure if it was a gesture of comfort, to touch the white-gold pentacle resting against the skin there, or a gesture of remembered pain, for there also was the place where he had once borne a raw, bleeding wound in the shape of a handprint. Surprisingly, it was Deyavi (whose entrance had been largely unnoticed) who offered comfort to the terror-stricken white-haired vampire.

“We must do this thing,” she murmured to him softly, her hand touching his face gently to force his gaze to meet hers, “This enemy which causes you so much pain is not here, and this will be our only chance for you to learn what you must learn in order to defeat them.”

He closed his eyes, and nodded. When he opened them he had let his hand drop from Victoria's shoulder and she had moved cautiously toward the dreaded room. He remembered his vivid dream, remembered the enemy that had reached out of the blackness and tried to force him with pain to submit . . .

Victoria held her weapon securely in her hands. Malakai was not a coward, not easily taken to fear or displays of weakness, and anything that frightened him that badly would be taken seriously by her. Alucard followed after her, the Casull gripped casually in one hand. She wondered idly why he did not draw the Jackal, but let the thought go. It wasn't that unusual for him to choose his older, less powerful weapon to begin a battle. The Jackal wasn't always needed and Alucard did not waste bullets. Deyavi and Gavril had no weapons that Victoria could see but that didn't matter much. Vampires did not need guns. They were just nice to have around.

She focused now entirely on the room before her, leaning her body against the doorway, shutting out thoughts of her companions. They could certainly take care of themselves. She swung her body into the room, making a sweep with her weapon, from right to left and back, more slowly the second time, checking for hidden enemies. Her sharp, crimson eyes gave the room a once over, seeing without seeing, looking for signs of life. She found none on the floor, but when she looked up . . .

A small, sharp intake of breath followed her horrendous discovery. The ceiling was high, plated with metal. The room was almost the same size as the room above, emphasizing how far she'd had to drop to get there. And hanging from this ceiling were chains from which there were suspended dozens and dozens of humans. Some were obviously horribly mutilated, others seemed whole until the gentle rotation and sway of their chains revealed their faces, with lips sliced off with precision, a strange black and green beginning to tint the area. Others had had their eyes ripped out, hair sliced off, fingers twisted back and back and back until they were nearly broken off. All seemed to be in various stages of development in a few common traits. Doughy, sickening white skin. Some were covered entirely in it, for others, it was spreading outward from their abdomens to the rest of their bodies. Their hair was falling out, gently pooling upon the floor with only the softest of sounds. Their mouths were rotting around the place where their lips had been removed.

Each and every one had a wound in the shape of a hand imprinted deeply onto their abdomen.

She gagged on the air of this place, even fouler than the air in the above chamber. It was fouled with blood and bleach and burnt flesh.

Almost as horrifying was what she saw when she let her eyes drop and surveyed the room before her, truly seeing it for the first time.

Strapped to steel tables, naked, stretched out like pagan sacrifices in a ritual of blood, were the prone bodies of five vampires. Some of the tables were tilted up so that the vampires were suspended almost vertically. Others were laid completely flat, blood dripping in a maddening rhythm onto the metal surface, their head tilted and stretched to the side, straining to get at the little droplets with their torturous rhythm. Blood was smeared on their faces; around their eyes, around their mouths. Their descent into the rotting creatures that they would inevitably become was clearly much slower, because their skin was, for the most part, still a silvery-white, their eyes still intact. They did not have hair, but it had been shaved off, and blood was now painted in strange patterns on their scalps that struck Victoria as vulgar, though she couldn't say precisely why.

Circles of blood . . .

They were all unconscious. Unmoving and silent as corpses, they did not breathe and their hearts beat so slowly that Victoria could have imagined them to be ordinary dead people . . . except that she knew better.

All of them but for one. This one, lying silent and alone in a corner of the room, was withered and dry like an unwrapped mummy. The skin was taut and drawn over the bones like paper, brown and ugly. It was skeletal, obscenely so, with stringy bits of hair falling over its shoulders. She shuddered. Its body was long and she imagined that if it had stood it would have been nearly as tall as Alucard. The hair was white-silver like Malakai's and she again felt a shiver run through her as her mind connected her beloved brother in blood to this dried out husk of a body. She was prepared to turn away and move her focus to another part of the room when the unthinkable and horrifying caught her full attention.

It moved. Writhed actually, noiseless except for the rustle of its paperlike skin. Strained weakly against the leather straps which bound it to the steel table.

Victoria pressed her sleeve against her mouth to stifle the scream.

Alucard watched impassively up to that point. He moved forward and, catching her gently by her arm, propelled her toward the table. She resisted only slightly, knowing that, if he wished her to approach the thing on the table, it was inevitable. He stopped at the table's edge, and bent his dark head toward the browned, mummified body that was somehow still alive. The smile spreading slowly over his face was wrong, given the circumstances. His eyes, with their irises the color of blood, slid over the moving corpse.

“What do you crave?” he asked, that insanely, obscenely, excitedly rough voice of his.

The vampire's mouth opened and a soft, creaking whoosh of air emerged, but no sound. It didn't matter. Alucard understood well enough. And so did Victoria. She felt sick inside. Deyavi's slender hand on her arm gave her something to focus on. It showed how out of it Victoria was, that she had not noticed the approach of the female vampire.

“Victoria.”

Oh dear God. He wasn't going to ask her to -

“Give me your arm.”

Yes, he was.

She sighed. And then offered her arm, as ordered. He gently slid a finger over the skin, and Victoria found herself wondering at the blood that welled up along the path it had taken across her wrist. He was even wearing gloves. She stopped trying to figure it out before it gave her a headache. Some things, she did not want to know.

He tipped her wrist so that the blood dripped downward, pattering onto the vampire's face and streaming into its mouth. She grimaced. The corpse-vampire did not react for a long while, became still as stone. But it didn't last long. Suddenly it was sitting up, the bond which held its arms broken, and an inhuman scream ripped through the throat. It writhed violently. The steel of the table dented and creaked under the force. Victoria took an involuntary step back.

The transformation occurring before their eyes was astounding. The brown, taut skin began to lighten in color and the skeletal frame began to fill out with flesh. The eyes opened and they watched as the shriveled, dry little prunes of its eyes became hydrated and full and white, with vivid red irises. The hair darkened and became black, thick, and glossy, fanning out over its shoulders. The scream changed from a brittle, shrill cry to a full, rich, human sound of pain. The body that now lay before them was perfect, alive, and female.

The silvery-white skin was bare and gooseflesh began to prickle up across the female vampire's arms. Scars laced across her stomach and arms, traced thin, nearly invisible paths up the side of her neck to her jaw. She was exquisitely formed, and looking at her, Victoria felt embarrassed for her nakedness. The nudity of the others was easy to ignore because they barely resembled anything vampire, or human. She was clearly not one of them. Victoria looked around for something to cover the revitalized female vampire and saw nothing immediately. Deyavi offered her own jacket, a loose, soft covering that draped to her knees and when buttoned would cover the nude female modestly. Victoria took the offered jacket and helped the shivering ex-moving-corpse into it, watching the slender fingers do up the buttons in the blink of an eye.

“Who are you?” Alucard demanded.

“I am called Lansing,” the vampiress answered.

“How did you get here?”

“I was captured.”

“What did they do to you here?”

“They tried to make me into one of them,” Lansing answered, gesturing to the creatures dangling from the ceiling and strapped to tables.

“Why did they fail?”

“I was one of the first they tried to create. They did not know what they were doing. They used me as an experiment. They did not succeed. I would not submit to the madness. Instead I chose the Sleep.”

The Sleep. Victoria had heard of this thing. It was what vampires had done in the past when too many humans had discovered their existence. Hide underground, lay oneself upon an altar, and sleep. The body would eventually starve itself into a physically dead state, but the soul would remain, asleep, inside the body, waiting for someone to nourish the body with blood. It took a while to accomplish. For some it took centuries to decay to the extent that Lansing had. She must have been desperate, to have forced the process along so far in such a short time. And yet she had been moving when they arrived, so she had woken somehow in the meantime, without the blood.

“How did you stay awake without the blood?” Victoria asked.

“I woke only when you arrived. I could smell your blood.”

“That was enough to wake you?”

“It was.”

Lansing, with the graceful legs and the slender body, unfastened the buckles on her ankles and swung her legs modestly over the table's edge. Malakai offered her a hand and Victoria saw that he was behaving strangely.

It was his eyes that shocked her, however. The expression in his eyes was one of awe, and tenderness. The way he had positioned himself between Lansing and the others was protective. His lips were parted and they trembled ever so slightly. What was going on? What had happened to him in this hellish place?

Lansing smiled and accepted the offered hand with one of her own. Victoria's head was spinning. Too much new information to absorb in too little time.

First, There was Deyavi, with her dark, silky hair that cascaded in a straight, smooth fall midway down her back. Deyavi with the crimson eyes and the silver-white skin and the pearly, elegant fangs that were slightly longer than Seras' own. The vampiress who stood barely an inch taller than Seras' five-foot-eight, with simple blue jeans and a dark grey shirt with sleeves that came to her elbows and a wide neck that exposed the slightest bit of her shoulder and her collarbones. Deyavi, with the slender artists' hands that Seras could clearly picture touching Gavril's skin with love and gentleness and passion, or crushing an enemy, or embracing a victim in their last moments.

And Gavril, the tall vampire who stood even with Malakai in height, the mate of Deyavi, with the black hair that framed his face, cut short over his ears but allowed to grow to the base of his neck, probably so that Deyavi could enjoy running her fingers through it. Gavril, with the eerie, unusual eyes of an electric green that was foreign and intimidating in their rareness. Gavril, with the sensual smile, and the silken, powerful voice, who spoke so rarely, who stood protectively near his woman, with his leather jacket draped over her shoulders lovingly. With the graceful, powerful hands that she had seen sneak gentle, reassuring touches to Deyavi's arms and hands and hips when no one was watching. Gavril, dressed in a plain, black longsleeve shirt and jeans, with boots tucked underneath, and a white-gold chain disappearing into the neckline of the shirt.

Lansing, with the man's name, dressed only in Deyavi's long jacket, a complete stranger who had been woken from a vampire's sleep with Victoria's own blood, who made Malakai tremble with some unknown emotion. The vampiress with the glossy hair the color of night, black and not black, that brushed her shoulders, with the crimson eyes that saw everything. Lansing, with the perfect, barely curved body that stood at level with the the bottom of Malakai's lower lip. Lansing, who had been a victim of some terrible evil. Lansing, who had, miraculously, not been turned into a monster.

It was too much. Too many new people at once. Too many things Victoria wanted to know and understand. Three life stories and a bigger, menacing mystery to solve and unwind.

And to think that only a day ago she had been complaining of boredom.

And to make things better, Alucard, her own mate, her former master, the scourge and love of her existence, was laughing at her.

Oh, he wasn't being loud. But he gentle lift and fall of his shoulders and the fang-baring smile on his face spoke volumes louder than his voice could reach. She wanted to slap him.

“SO,” she said irritably, too loudly, turning away from Alucard, “Can you tell us more about these things? Surely you must know something about how they are made, what they can do . . . who makes them?”

Lansing smiled shyly.

“I know many things about this place. But, I need clothes. And we need to leave this room. It is not safe, even for the undead. As you can see from my companions on the tables over there,” she replied.

A rich, accented, haunting voice. A perfect match to Malakai's own. Victoria decided not to dwell on it. She merely turned and strode back to the washroom they had entered from. As she turned she saw Alucard's darkly handsome face, no longer laughing, touched with a calm smile that did not reach his eyes.

It was his smile of apology. It was the best she was ever going to get.

Once they had assembled in the washroom and Victoria had firmly locked the door to that strange room with the monsters-in-progress, Lansing took to rifling through the cabinets until she found her clothes. A simple white shirt and pants that looked just the way a pair of pants should. Soft, worn, and gently faded. They politely turned their backs while she dressed, more out of modesty than necessity (they had already seen her naked, after all), and when she had finished, Victoria waited eagerly for the answers to her questions.

“This place,” Lansing began, sitting on the floor, “has been here for years. I am not sure how long. I was brought here during the construction of the upper chamber, when the floor was still rough and the room itself still very small. These rooms, and some others, were already complete.”

“How did they capture you?”

“I was asleep, lying in my coffin, and they sealed it shut and brought me here in it, over sacred ground that forced me to sleep. Had I not been protected by my last domain, I would not have survived the crossing.

It angered me, and I struggled for many months against their efforts to use me for their experiments. But eventually, they managed to starve me into submission. It was difficult for them, because I frequently attacked and fed from their own men, but they succeeded in quieting me.

They strapped me to their metal table and tried to change me. At first they tried to simply cut me, cut out my eyes, remove my lips, and so forth. But a vampire's body heals from nearly any injury inflicted upon it, so they did not succeed. Then she came with her partner, finally, to observe their work herself. And then everything was pain. She would let them take her blood from her body, at first, to use on me, but found it ineffective. It was not directly from her, so it lost its power, and the symbols that they drew on me did nothing but sting my skin. Then she interfered. She would cut her fingers with her own fangs and used the blood on them to draw their designs on my face, my chest and stomach and hands.

But they still did nothing. They were using an old text, you see, to find whatever incantation they were painting on me, and they were making mistakes.

When she read it, there were no mistakes. It was when the circles of blood that she traced on me began to burn into my skin that I knew I had to sleep. This ceremony they were trying to perform requires an aware, sane, coherent victim, conscious of pain and danger. In the Sleep, this would be impossible. I summoned my will to force the process to speed up, and eventually I was useless to them. They shoved me into that corner, and there I have been until you woke me tonight,” Lansing finished.

Victoria sat, absorbing this information quietly.

Circles of blood . . .

That was what that meant. They burned the victims with her blood. Circles surrounding the eyes, mouth, and around the symbols on the shaved heads.


She ran a hand through her own short blonde hair and sighed. This was all very interesting, but it wasn't what she needed to know.

She didn't see Deyavi's bitter smile.

“What are these things? What powers do they have?”

“They are the walking dead.”

That didn't make sense.

“Vampires are the walking dead,” Victoria said impatiently.

“No. We are the undead. Our hearts beat. We breathe. We have souls. These things do not have hearts. Their lips have been removed so that they can no longer speak as the living do. The eyes, the windows to the soul, have been torn from their faces. But it matters not, because they have no souls,” Lansing explained patiently.

No souls. No hearts. Dear God.

“The walking dead,” Victoria breathed, taking in the phrase with new understanding.

Lansing smiled.

“So what do they do? How do you kill them?” Victoria asked.

“They cannot die, because they are already dead. Only the magic of the blood keeps them on this earth. Their minds are full of hatred and self-loathing, and madness, because these are the last things they experienced in life. Only dark things. Only evil things. They struggle to replace what was lost to them, what was stolen from them.”

Victoria pondered that for a moment.

“What was stolen . . .”

But it matters not, because they have no souls.

“Their souls. They . . . suck the souls out of people?”

“Devour them entirely,” Lansing confirmed, “Once you are taken by them, you cease to exist.”

Sweet Jesus.

“How do you destroy them?”

“Destroy them? You cannot. They can only fall if the blood is destroyed.”

“So we have to kill whoever made them?” Victoria asked, comprehension falling in place like puzzle pieces of a long unanswered mystery, “That's the only way. I was told that some of the victims are willing. How is this so?”

“Lies. She comes to them in the night, a true siren. She lies, tells them of a greater power that only she can offer. But they must suffer pain to obtain it, must willingly follow her. She approaches only those vampires with powerlust in their hearts, because they cannot refuse her.”

How sad, that they would sacrifice so much for a lie . . . Deyavi's words haunted Malakai and he looked at her.

“You knew, and said nothing,” he said quietly.

He did not look at her but it was clear that the words were directed at Deyavi.

“I knew, and promised that you would learn all. I can tell you nothing,” she replied sadly.

He turned to look at her, finally, eyes searching.

“Why?”

Deyavi looked at Gavril. He nodded slightly. She straightened from her position against the wall, leaning into Gavril's arms. She lifted her shirt.

There was a scar there, thick and raised and pink. A perfect circle.

Circles of blood . . .

She pulled aside her curtain of hair and, slowly, a mark began to rip to the skin of her neck on one side. An ugly scar, jagged, like someone had tried to rip out her throat.

“Lansing was not the only one taken. But Lansing was luckier than some of the victims, taken many years before her,” Deyavi whispered quietly, “I was taken, too, many hundreds of years ago. As was Gavril. We were held captive by arts long forgotten to the world. After a half century of agony as they tried again and again to change us, we decided it was enough. We escaped in the only was that was left to us.”

The meaning of those words was clear. It was sickening to imagine it. Lovers bent over each other, embracing for the last time as they took turns tearing each other's throats out. And then a slow, triumphant, sad death in their dark prison.

“This is impossible. If . . . but you're alive,” Victoria said, eyes wide.

“We were sent back. We died before our time. Fate held us until it was our time to return, and that time is now. Malakai was given a vision of us so that he would know to expect us.”

Malakai stared numbly.

From Everywhere. From Nowhere. From Fate. She comes.

God.

“I am the one who will allow you to destroy the blood.”

Her gaze was directed now at Alucard. It was to him that that last sentence had been spoken.

“But why? Why is this happening? What is the purpose behind all of this?” Victoria choked out, looking at Alucard in fear.

Deyavi's gaze never left Alucard.

“They want you. You, and your mate.”

Alucard's face was expressionless. And when he suddenly phased, there was no warning. Only a soft whirl of shadows as the dark vampire, the former Prince of vampires, disappeared.

Author's note: Lansing is pronounced like “Lancing”, not “Lahn-sing” Just thought you should know. The next chapter will be focused on the events at Hellsing. It will take a rare turn and focus mainly on Alucard, I promise you. Since this is all his fault, anyway. It always is.