Lockhart's Legacy (Vespari Lockhart Book 1) (19 page)

The boy tried to get up, but his body was slow and weak after the fall. He had only just got to his feet when his father made it down the stairs and turned toward the back room. Corrigan tried to go for the knife he’d seen before the fall so that he could flee that place, but his father, despite the booze, was quicker.

The drunk grabbed Corrigan’s shirt by its back collar with his big, thick fingers. “Look what you’ve done, you clumsy idiot!” his father shouted.

The boy struggled to get free from his father’s clutches, but his attempts were in vain. His father grabbed his arm and twirled him around. He raised his hand and smacked him across the face, sending him right back down to the ground with a hard thud.

“Well, say something, dummy!” his father taunted.

Corrigan pursed his lips tightly together, refusing to utter a single, stuttering word, as a trail of blood dripped down from his nose.

“Dumber than that whore mother of yours,” the brute said.

Corrigan clenched his hand into a fist and glared at his father.

“Oh? What? You going to do something?”

The boy managed to stand and backed away from his father.

“That’s what I thought. An idiot and a coward to boot.”

He’d misunderstood Corrigan’s intentions. The boy hadn’t meant to flee his father but rather to position himself closer to the blade. He cut his eyes over to the glinting metal and took one more step back, now within reach of the cleaver. With a quickness the man’s drunk eyes could hardly follow, Corrigan snatched the knife and pried it from the wood cutting board it had been wedged into.

His father laughed. “What do you think you’re going to do with that, you little shit?”

Corrigan tightened and loosened his grip on the handle of the blade, not quite sure himself. Even though the alcohol slowed his father down, he didn’t want to try fighting him. The man was a hulking giant compared to him, and the cleaver wasn’t going to give him enough of an advantage. No, he would have to try something else. Looking to the table on his other side, Corrigan spotted a meat tenderizer. He picked it up with his free hand and chucked it right at his father’s head.

The drunk was too slow to get out of its way, and the metal tool struck his forehead hard. The man groaned, bending over and holding the wound. When he looked up, his eyes had lost all of the fuzziness of his drunken state. He glared at Corrigan and growled.

“You’re going to pay for that, boy!”

Corrigan stepped back, while his father stepped forward. That same pool of blood that Corrigan had slipped on was still there, however, and just like the boy had, the man slid in the blood and fell. He landed with a heavy thud on the ground, and Corrigan wasted no time. He sprung forward, using his father’s gut as a stepping-stone and leaping toward the back door. His father was hurt, but he wasn’t out yet. He reached out and grabbed Corrigan’s ankle as he leapt, tripping the boy as he landed.

“You’re not going anywhere!” the man shouted.

Corrigan hardly even thought about the action, and he gripped the cleaver, swinging it down into his father’s wrist. The man screamed, as the blade sliced right through bone and muscle. Released, Corrigan scurried away and finally escaped, leaving the screams of his father behind him and sure that he could never go home again. No great loss, he decided. Finding and saving Levi was far more important than that small bedroom above a butcher’s shop. Since his mother’s death, his home had offered him little more than dread and pain.

Leaving the drunk and now mutilated butcher behind, Corrigan prepared to start his search for Levi. He knew exactly where he had to go. The only body that the police had found had wedged into a pipe in a stream of sewage. This one clue made him suspect that the monster had to live somewhere down in the sewers. Alexandria was an ancient city, built on top of older civilizations, and as such, the tunnels running under the city were a sprawling labyrinth of varying origins. Finding one creature among crypts, mines, and the more recently constructed sewers could prove an impossible task, but he vowed to find Levi no matter what the cost was to him.

Arriving at the drain in question, Corrigan realized the blood of whatever animals his father had slaughtered and sliced up that day still covered him. He considered cleansing himself of the gore, but upon careful consideration decided to leave it on. Perhaps the smell would draw the monster that had taken his friend. If nothing else, the blood gave him a gruesome appearance and served as a strange source of courage to him. So, wearing that blood as a sort of mental armor, Corrigan dropped down into the sewer to start his search.

There were numerous stories of what was down in those depths. Long before Alexandria was established, the original inhabitants erected a series of monuments to dead rulers of the past. Their grand tombs still resided under the city streets and were just one small portion of what the sewers had become. Later, they mined the area, in search of rare minerals and other shiny rocks. Long shafts ran underneath the city, some having caved in over the years, some with the miners still trapped within. No one really knew what lurked within those tunnels, but Corrigan found himself in the newest portions of it.

Slimy, discolored, moss-covered bricks lined the sewers, and down the middle of the tunnel, a steady stream of filth flowed. The sound of dripping water echoed all around him, and the smell was nearly enough to knock him over. Being the son of a butcher, Corrigan knew foul odors, but this was something altogether different. The only light entering those tunnels came in the form of the candlelit lamps from the street above and the scarce bit of starlight that managed to creep through grates and slits above him. After a few minutes, his eyes adjusted to this new darkness, and the boy started to move through those tunnels with deftness.

Having lived mostly on the street since his mother died, Corrigan had a decent understanding of Alexandria’s layout. He didn’t know the sewers nearly as well, but he at least understood where the water flowed to and from. Given where the sliced up body had been found, he knew roughly where it had to have been dropped in the waters. Whether that would lead him to the monster’s lair, he would have to wait to find out.

As he moved in that direction, Corrigan gripped the cleaver in his hand and swept his eyes quickly from one side of the sewers to the other. He wasn’t sure what kind of creature he was looking for. He’d only heard stories as to the kinds of monsters a vespari hunted. The nosferatu, the lycanthrope, and the living dead were among the more popular stories that children told each other in the dark. How much of that information was accurate and usable was questionable, but he didn’t believe that any of those monsters would have been responsible for this.

He’d also heard tales of vile creatures living in the sewers, most of them having some connection to the city’s long, storied past. Maybe some ancient creature had awoken from its slumber and had need for children. His young mind couldn’t wrap around a possible reason for such a need, but he hoped that whatever it was that Levi was still alive. Only one body of the missing children had surfaced, after all. He took that as a reason for hope.

Despite his forced optimism, Corrigan couldn’t help but think of his friend in a similar state as the boy that the police found. Stuffed in a bag, sliced up so much that no one could recognize him. Mutilated, tortured, and lifeless. His grip tightened on that cleaver every time those images appeared in his head. He had no idea to what depths he would sink if his friend really had died, but in that darkness, he saw no bottom to the pit inside his heart.

Continuing to trace the sewage stream, Corrigan eventually found he wasn’t alone down there. No monsters to speak of yet, but he stumbled upon several rats. They appeared on the other side of the tunnel, across the water, but they moved in the opposite direction as him. They scurried away. They fled. This started with one small group, but the further he walked, the more he saw. After a while, there seemed a steady flow of the rodents, on both the other side of the tunnel and then his own. He moved against them, careful not to crush the little things. Whatever they fled from, he knew that was what he sought.

Eventually, he passed the hoard of rats and came to an area of relative silence. The noise of the city above had died down, and no longer did its lights illuminate those depths. He had to use a railing to continue forward in that dank dark, but after a ways, a light appeared ahead. This was not the simple light of a candle, however. This roaring fire reflected its light off the gleaming, mossy green bricks. In front of the fire that, despite its intensity, seemed contained, Corrigan saw movement.

He crouched down and crept forward, as silent as he could manage and tried to get his eyes to adjust to this new brightness. As Corrigan grew closer, he started to hear words over the crackle of the fire. Words. That meant whatever he’d stumbled upon was intelligent. Not a mindless monster. The figure itself was nothing more than a dark silhouette cast upon the fire though, so he continued forward, all indication of fear fading away.

A bit closer and Corrigan gained a better look at the area where this fire and this orating figure resided. The flames were growing out of a section of sewage trapped within a little dam, while the figure walked back and forth in front of them, spewing echoing but indiscernible words. This individual was not alone, however. A cage sat between the figure and the fire, only coming into view as Corrigan passed a section of the tunnel.

The cage was short and occupied by a small figure of its own. He crept forward a little more and found that there were more than the one. Four cages in total, each occupied by little, unmoving bodies. Each of them lay crumpled on the floor of the cage, so Corrigan couldn’t determine if any of them were Levi. Everything in him told him that this was where his friend was though.

The words of this creature became clearer as he approached as well, and Corrigan stopped just before the chamber, crouching behind a pile of crumbled bricks. He understood a few of the words, but there were strange, unknown sounds interspersed between them. The speech was wild and slurred, and on the whole, none of it made much sense. The pace of it, however, felt like a religious chant, and that made him realize what this was.

Within Alexandria, a group had established a religion some years back. Its name was the Dawning of the Eternal Night. Most everyone recognized it for what it was - a cult. They revered the dark creatures of the night, worshiping them like gods and seeking to bring more monstrous things into the world. They practiced rituals for purposes not clearly understood, but their intentions were clear, causing the vespari to hunt them the same as monsters.

That was when Corrigan realized that he was not hunting a vile monster like he’d first assumed. This was a mortal man, twisted in his mind and hoping to somehow appease the darkness of the world. This strange cultist had used his friend and the other children as part of some ritual that he’d concocted.

The vespari should have been there to stop this mad cultist. That was their role, but Corrigan was the only one there. He had to do something. He had to put an end to this ritual and its practitioner before any more of the children came to harm. The boy gripped the cleaver and crept forward as the robed man moved away from him and toward the cages where he kept one of the children. When the man reached it, he fiddled with a lock, and once he’d unlocked it, he grabbed the child, dragging them back to the center of the room. Corrigan took this opportunity to get nearly within swinging distance, but the man twisted about before he could use that cleaver.

The man glared at him with wild eyes and smiled, showing his missing and rotten teeth. “Have you come for the ritual?” he asked, laughing to himself. “I can always use more sacrifices!”

“I-I-I’ve c-c-come to s-s-stop y-y-you,” the boy replied, his stutter worse than ever.

“Ha!” the cultist shouted. “You are nothing! A timid thing with a knife.” He raised his hands high into the air. “The writhing ancients stand behind me.”

“I’m n-n-not afraid.”

The crazed man’s stare intensified. “You will be! I will sacrifice your blood and youth to them just as I have the others.”

“N-n-no m-m-m-more,” Corrigan said, running toward the man.

He raised the cleaver up and prepared to swing, but the man did nothing more than rear back and cackle. A true lunatic, he didn’t even react when Corrigan sunk the cleaver into his chest. Unfortunately, this didn’t have the effect that the boy hoped it would. No blood flowed from the wound. Corrigan pried the cleaver out from the man’s flesh and saw that the slit he’d carved in the man’s chest was entirely empty. He stared into the blackness of the hole, believing it to be a source of infinite darkness.

The mad cultist finally stopped laughing and stared down at Corrigan. “I told you, boy! You are nothing to me! I am protected by the writhing ancients!”

He reached out and grabbed Corrigan by his neck, lifting him into the air with a strength that didn’t match the frail form. The boy kicked and flailed as his feet left the ground, and he started to choke as the grimy fingers tightened around his throat. Intending to do the same to this man as he’d done to his father, Corrigan swung the cleaver at his wrist. The blade came to a stop at the bone and wedged itself there, however, and the man seemed no more upset by this than he’d been by the gaping wound in his chest.

“You must be impatient,” the crazed man said. “Very well.” He kicked away the unmoving child he’d pulled from the cage. “You will take this one’s place then.”