Neither Blood nor Seed

Trigger warning: Contains Welsh language.

Lol.

I've been writing about Felix The Vampire periodically for many years, so here's another one. I'm entering this as part of Lit's

Halloween Story Contest 2023

, so please read all the entries and reward your favorites with your votes!

* * *

Prologue

Feet soft on the mud, toes stumbling in the deep cracks in the pottery of the bared reservoir bed, the woman ran for her life.

She carried with her nothing but a thin line of blood streaking her chest and the memory of her lover's head, bouncing off into the night like a soccer ball poorly kicked. Apart from that she was naked, naked with her fears and her disbelief and her confusion, sprinting up toward the old shoreline under the uncaring autumn moon.

She paused at the top of the bank, hearing nothing behind her since that initial confusing swirl of sound and vision: a snarling howl, a dark shape blasting out of the floor in a shotgun burst of water and stone, the sickened whimper of David in the dark. David, him of the cocksure voice and the splendid prick.

David, him of the rolling head, still vivid with a look of shock, spraying blood on its way toward the shadowed water.

She had not stayed after that, her instinct seizing her legs and spinning them, pushing her back toward the road with David's blood on her skin, skin still sex-flushed from his strong, sturdy pumps into her.

Her eyes had caught something terrible in the moments before she'd fled, something she'd refused to accept; as she stood high over the shrunken reservoir now, though, she set her hands on her knees and bent over, her body heaving in breathless sobs, staring far back over the cracked mud, seeing once more the shape by the church under the moon. And the shape was still doing that terrible thing, bent over David's headless pale body, gnawing at the tangled remains of his neck.

Drinking.

With a sudden wash of panic, she whirled and set off back into the dark, running. Feet soft on grass, now, but nothing else had really changed: she was still running for her life.

* * *

Lleoliad y Drosedd/The Crime Scene

* * *

Nobody calls the vicar after midnight with good news.

He woke up blinking, eyes on the clock, thinking at once of old Hugh Dyer in the hospice. He'd been poorly this afternoon when the Reverend Mr Norris had come to visit him, and now he must have passed. Norris sat up in bed, reaching for the phone, already thinking of Mrs Dyer and the words she'd need to hear by the old man's bedside. "Hello?"

"Parson?" The voice on the other end of the phone would have been more familiar if Norris had been more awake. "Sorry to call so late, but we've a bit of trouble up here at the Reservoir. I've sent a car for you."

He blinked, struggling to understand. "The Reservoir?"

"There's been a fatality. Best to wear some boots, parson." The phone clicked off before Norris had really registered who'd been on the other end of the line, but it could only have been Anthony Wynn. Among other things, the gruff old policeman was the only one around who called him

parson

.

Norris craned himself slowly out of his bed, the draft from the window jetting most unpleasantly over his skin. He was the kind of tall, skinny man who was always cold even through as blazing a summer as this had been, and life up here was not (so far) kind to his build and disposition. He was just rummaging in his closet, seeking boots, when the headlights of the arriving car stabbed through the windows of the little stone parsonage, chasing away the night-shadows whether or not they wished to go.

And they never seemed to, up here in these mountains. Here, shadows tended to linger.

He clumped out to find PC Davis standing by the police car, leaning on the door. "Reverend," he nodded, the word possessing a hint of a quite-unnecessary H sound. Norris had not gotten used to the accent here, and feared he never would. "The Guv told me to make sure you've got your boots on?"

"Thank you. Yes. I do." Norris slipped into the passenger seat, tossing his little bag in the back. He had a few bags always packed; this one was for deaths. "What's happened?"

"No idea, sir. Big doings up at the Reservoir." The man was tiny, his words drifting out with that mellifluous Welsh quality that always sounded to Norris like the speakers had one side of their tongues glued to their molars. "I've just now been woke up, same as you."

Norris nodded thoughtfully, the night pressing close as the car flitted over the hills. "We'll find out together, then." The PC said nothing at all, and that was that.

Conversation over.

They saw the lights over the brow of the last hill even before they crossed the Dam Road, big spotlights set up hastily below the far shore. He stirred, looking over at three or four police constables in the glow of the lights beside the silent church, brooding on the mud in a nighttime blur of grey slate. The sight troubled him for no reason that he could name, except one:

The church should not be there. Not out in the night air, anyway.

The Reservoir had drowned an old village when they'd built the dam, and its church had not been spared the rising flood. When Norris had arrived six months before, however, the tip of the steeple had already broken the still waters, and then over the slow hot summer the stonework had risen higher and higher above the shining surface as the Reservoir had shrunk, the drought taking a fierce toll all over Northern Europe. At the beginning of October the whole church had been exposed, its squat Normanesque nave now furtive under the pale moon with its watery blanket flung aside.

Blurred pale faces looked up at the car as it eased out past the parking lot, their eyes shining oddly under the harsh fluorescents. They'd passed a blue tent at the end of the road, lights winking from underneath the sides. "This is as far as I go, Reverend."

"Thank you." He bounded from the car and caught his footing on the long grass at the top of the bank. Once this had been the shoreline, the kind of place where anglers trailed their lines on lazy afternoons. But the water was now almost a quarter-mile distant. "Be safe, Mr Davis." It bothered Norris that he couldn't remember the lad's first name: Glyn, probably. Or maybe Owen.

Rhys? High probability. This was, after all, Wales.

He took in the scene as he stumbled down toward the mud, its cracked sun-baked surface looking strikingly like unfired pottery. The floodlight had been set up facing the door of the ancient church, casting strong shadows from the policemen huddled now amidst quiet Welsh over what he saw was a covered body a few feet from the doorway. He crossed himself as he approached, seeing troubled eyes in unshaven faces. "Gentlemen," he nodded.

"Parson." Superintendent Wynn was a stern man at the best of times. Tonight, he seemed almost sepulchral. "Sorry to have you out so late, but." He nodded down at the covered shape.

"Not at all. It's a mercy to pray over the dead." He meant it too, the clean compassion of a man of god. James Norris was not a man who believed god wanted his flock to be boisterous, nor enthusiastic; he believed in showing simple mercies to simple people, all the time.

"You're here for more than that," Wynn muttered flatly. Peering up at Norris, he stooped down to pull aside the sheet. "Ready?"

"Of course." Norris set his bag down carefully and watched as the policeman threw aside the covering. For a moment his mind refused to believe what it saw, but after a few blinks he sighed. "Poor fellow."

"Yep." The superintendent watched closely as Norris knelt and whispered a simple prayer, waiting patiently until he rose back to his feet. "We're still looking for the head. We... we've reason to believe it's over yonder." He nodded at the black water.

"A young man." The body was naked, well-formed, a perfect specimen of a healthy male youth, aged around twenty. Pale dust covered his skin, other than where odd claw-looking marks had raked through it. "Do you know who he is?"

A nod. "McCormick. David McCormick. Twenty-five years of age, from Caerphilly."

"Caerphilly? Down south?" Norris sighed unhappily. "He's far from home. Shall I contact his family, Mr Wynn?"

"Not necessary, parson. We're on it. But thank you." The superintendent started, his eyes sharpening as he seemed to remember something. "Wait. You're a doctor too, right? Or... almost a doctor?"

"Almost a doctor, sir." Norris smiled. "I was nearly there, but God had other ideas."

The superintendent nodded thoughtfully. "Well. Doctor Meredith is on her way to take a look at all this, but if you've any ideas along the medical line? I'd be interested to hear them."

Norris felt himself go still. "Of course." He'd wanted to be a doctor. He'd wanted it with a blazing, fierce passion. He still wondered whether he'd made the right choice as he cleared his throat under the eyes of the police. "I mean, cause of death is obvious enough. Beheading." He frowned. "Has he been moved, Mr Wynn?"

"He was right here when we arrived." Two of the detectives spoke softly in Welsh by the floodlight. "You see it, don't you."

"One would think," Norris said slowly, "that there should be a great deal more blood than this."

"One would think so, indeed."

Norris, still frowning, bent low to examine the stump of the neck. It looked... wrong. That is, apart from the obvious. "This wasn't cut, I think." His brain went someplace it had not been for a long time, trawling through anatomy books and delving into the cadaver laboratory, remembering what a severed neck should look like... "Some of the vessels are longer than the rest. And this vertebra..." One of the young man's backbones lay off to the side, as if it had slid off the spinal cord. Had something torn the man's head clean off? And if so, what? He glanced around, but saw nothing that could have done that. Not bloodlessly. "I'm afraid I can shed no light. This looks like a riddle well beyond my abilities."

"A riddle. Yes." Wynn cocked a cynical head, and it dawned on Norris that a career police constable probably saw as much gross anatomy as many doctors, even in the countryside like this. This was certainly not the first head these men had seen detached. The thought chilled him somewhat. "Well. That's not the only riddle. Shall I show you why I had you brought here, parson?"

"After you," Norris nodded, dusting the mud from his trousers. It was oddly cool down here for such a warm night, and as they passed beneath the old church's simple rounded arch it grew even colder, almost as if the chill was a physical thing, a blade sinking into his flesh and reaching to his bones.

"Been in here yet?" Wynn's voice seemed unnaturally loud in the cramped little church. "Kids have been coming down here since the end of September."

"No, actually," Norris began, but as the superintendent fired up a hefty aluminum flashlight, he could see the man was right. "All of this? Since September?" The walls glowed with dazzling spray paint, graffiti tags in dozens of colors. He could catch a faint whiff of paint on the air even now, a fresh can of pink Krylon by the door.

It saddened Norris.

"They don't waste time." The dancing beam of light swept around the space, barely reaching up to the old altar before settling on a long, ragged gash in the middle of the side aisle. "There it is."

"There what is?" The two men strode to the ruptured floor, Norris straining his eyes down to follow the beam as his feet crunched through a wild blanket of dirt. "Wet."

"Indeed. We've found the water table." The bottom of the hole was a murky wash of muddy water, though Norris could see floating bits and a long, rectangular outline lurking just below the surface. "Look there," Wynn pointed.

Norris knelt, peering low, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the scale of what he was looking at he could see now that the rectangular shape, the floating bits, were all pieces of wood. He gasped. "That's a grave!"

"Was," the superintendent said evenly, quietly, his light not budging. "Do you think someone dug it up, parson?"

"Must have," Norris frowned, but already his eyes were beginning to doubt that. "May I take the torch, Mr Wynn?"

"Certainly." The flashlight was quite heavy, and Norris swung it in a slow arc all around them. "What do you see?"

"If someone dug up the grave," Norris began haltingly, "why is the earth all scattered about? Why not pile it?"

"Why indeed." The superintendent sounded obscurely pleased. "I had the same question. And then there's a witness says that's not what happened." He took the priest's arm and gestured toward their feet. "Down here. It's why I called you."

Norris caught a dull glint in the light, a corroded corner, and when he played the beam across what he'd found he discovered a small box, sealed tight. "What is it?"

He could not see Wynn shrug, but he heard it in the man's voice. "It's why you're here. Whatever it is, it's yours."

"Mine?" Norris heard the catch in his voice, a certain sense of wildness creeping in, and he suppressed it at once. He had the oddest sense, like something was watching them.

"Yours." The superintendent's voice was solid and implacable as a swung cudgel, the two men crouching by the box. It looked as if it had been dropped there, or perhaps flung. "Look." His thick thumb found the sheened surface, sweeping away some old crusted dirt; Norris could see they'd made a furrow already, letters engraved there. "It's addressed to you."

A weird sense of doom hung over Norris as he leaned down to read the words, hard to decipher in an aged script, but clear enough in English: TO GOD'S VICAR IN LANTARF. The lines stood deeply graven in the metal. A long, solder-bright scar crossed the box near one end, as though it had been cut open and then stuck back together. "Is that lead?"

"Probably. It's bloody heavy enough to be lead." The policeman frowned curiously down. "You know scripts and things, parson. Any idea how old that inscription might be?"

"None at all." He touched the box with a strange sense of awe, as though something were holding him back. "They misspelled Llantarff." He handed the light back to the superintendent.

"Of course they did. They were probably English," Wynn said pointedly.

Norris absorbed the barb, ignored it, and then curled his hands around the sides of the box. The copper had not been lying; the thing was very heavy, despite its thinness. "Is it solid, you think?"

"It's hollow." The beam moved to the corner. "You can see where it's been soldered. There are seams all along the edges." The thing came up heavily, cradled in the priest's two hands. Almost as an afterthought, the policeman shone the light around again. "No blood in here, either."

Norris looked up sharply. "Should there be?"

"Perhaps, perhaps not." Wynn straightened and nodded toward the door. "Anyway. That's what I wanted you to see."

"Thank you." Norris said it a little distantly, not sure how he should respond as they left the drowned church back to its shadows. "Shall I open it?"

"I'm sure you want to." The superintendent sounded amused. "It's up to you, I suppose. Ever seen a casket like that before?"

"Never." Strictly speaking, though Norris had seen the insides of many graves, none had been older than the present day. "Often there's a plate on coffins? With the name of the deceased? Perhaps this is one of my predecessors."

"Just as you say, a plate." Wynn's eyes glittered as they passed back under the floodlights. "That's not a plate."

"

Cefais y pen!

" The shout came from down by the water, one of the constables emerging out of the night with soaked pants. "The head," he added, seeing Norris. It was well known locally that the priest couldn't speak the language well.

"Ah." The constable knelt by the covered corpse and lay an object beside the severed neck, very gingerly. David Hughes, Norris noted, had died with a shocked look on his face, as though he'd seen the Devil himself. He made a quick sign of the cross over the remains, head bowed, then frowned as he remembered something. "You said there was a witness, Mr Wynn?"

"I did, Parson Norris. And there is." He looked closely down at the priest. "What is your plan, sir, if I may ask? About that box?"

Norris' eyebrows rose. "I hadn't thought about it." He held the thing thoughtfully up and shook it, hearing a faint knock from within. "There's something in there, that's for certain."

"Have you got a way to crack it?" The superintendent shrugged as if it didn't much matter. "It's not evidence, per se. I suppose it's something that interests us, so if you come across anything inside? Perhaps you'd not mind sharing the information with us?"

"Not mind?" Norris laughed. "Really, I don't think of it as mine. You're more than welcome to it."

Wynn hesitated, glaring sharply at two detectives who whispered to each other in low Welsh. "A mysterious object coming from a grave and addressed to a churchman? I'd just as soon steer clear, especially after the story my witness gave me."

"Story?" Norris got to his feet. "A story that explains all these... unfortunate things?" He glanced down at the body, its head now looking almost as if it was attached. Almost. "If it's something you'd care to share, I'm happy to try to help?"

Wynn let out a long breath, his mustache fluttering. "It's a bit of an odd story, and I've not heard all of it. One of my constables is speaking to the witness up by the parking lot." He considered. "If you'd not mind, I suppose we'd be grateful for whatever you care to do. She might wish to speak to a priest, at that, after the night she's had."

"She?"

"The witness," Wynn announced with some pomposity, "is a young lady."

"Ah." Norris glanced back down, but one of the detectives had already covered him back up. Then he remembered David had been naked. "Ah. I see."

"No doubt you do." He nodded ponderously up the bank. "Well. You can see your way up to the lot, I suppose. There's a tent there, some tea and biscuits. You're welcome to a few, and then the witness is up there too."

"Thank you, Mr Wynn." The handshake was brief, then a nod for the other policemen, but everyone had already gone back to speaking Welsh, which Norris took as a sign that they no longer had much to say to him. He dropped the lead case into his bag, packed up the rest of his oddments, and plodded back up over the cracks in the mud, the floodlights fading behind him. The bank, with its tent, seemed a long way up.

There would need to be a very significant winter to shroud the church again, Norris thought to himself. Very significant.

* * *

Y Tyst/The Witness

* * *

He ducked through the flap in the tent, blinking at the naked fluorescent bulb blazing inside. A knot of people had gathered outside the Lakeside Pub nearby, but the constables kept them at a safe distance. "Hello," he said automatically, even before he could see who was in there. Norris put on what he thought of as a disarming smile. "I'm James Norris, a priest. Sorry to disturb; mind if I come in?"

He took in two women sitting at a small folding table, along with a sour-faced man standing in the corner with a tea so milky it almost looked white. One of the women wore police uniform, like the man with the tea; the other looked up from within a thick bathrobe, the kind good hotels give out. Or, rather, the kind good hotels donate to Constabulary clothing banks. "What's this, then?" she asked, eyeing him carefully. Her eyes were massive, the kind of eyes a man could drown in.