Beyond the Veil

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   The Count’s left shoulder stung with sudden pain, and the momentum of the bullet turned his elegant landing into a tumbling fall. He rolled across the cold, dewy grass, glimmering in the moonlight, and then began to run again, keeping low as he cursed this human interference. Then his whole four-hundred-year-old body was aflame with agony.

    Silver. He knew it only hurt him because that was what people believed it would do, but if he began to question the effect of the metal upon him then he would have to question what he himself had become all those centuries ago, and everything he had learned about the nature of the world since then.

    For he was a vampire, and he and his kind were the result of all human belief in vampires since the beginning of time. Belief had created them, and as beliefs had changed, so had they. It was the way of the world. He understood this. And so did whoever was hunting him; whoever had stopped him from carrying out the business of the Council.

    So he had to keep on running, snarling and clenching his sharp teeth against the pain, if he ever wanted to see his home, his world, again. It had to be here, beneath the moonlit steeple of the ancient church, in a place where human thoughts would be focused on death. Because old beliefs ran deep, and human belief had created more than just vampires.

    He jumped over the mossy wall of the graveyard, expecting to hear another shot before a bullet drove itself into the back of his skull, but when he landed safely on the other side he sprinted on, keeping low and desperately searching the darkness as he clutched the searing wound in his shoulder. He raced between the rows of gravestones as his vision became a blur of lichen-encrusted stone, long-forgotten names and tangled weeds.

    ‘O, Quam Misericors est Deus,’ he called out into the night, and ahead of him, hovering over a grave, appeared a pale, sickly flame, like the disembodied light of a guttering candle. He gasped with relief despite the pain. 

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By the time his pursuer arrived, the graveyard was empty. He was a tall man, old but strong, wearing a long brown overcoat and carrying a revolver. He was sweating from the exertion of having run so far, and steadied himself against a gravestone as he glanced around hopelessly through tired eyes. He stood panting for breath as his body sagged with fatigue, before suddenly shouting out into the night with angry despair:

   ‘Where are you?! Why are you so interested in the children? And where is my SON?’

   ‘Everyone ready? Let’s go!’

    Richard and Abigail sneaked out of St. Etheldred’s Boarding School with the other pupils as they had always done, making quietly for the big old church across the road.

    Their uncle, Tobias, had died that week. He had been their legal guardian and their only family in the five and a half years since their parents’ deaths, but the secret tradition of the Graveyard Games had to be upheld, no matter what.

    It was a cold night, but not the coldest upon which they had squeezed through the rusted iron gates of the closed churchyard. It was an obvious school rule (with a capital R) that no pupil was to leave their room after lights-out except to use the toilet, so naturally the children enjoyed breaking it. They filed silently down the overgrown pathway that led them around the derelict church, using pocket torches when the light of the thin crescent moon wasn’t enough to see by. They were never sowell-behaved on school trips or when waiting for lessons to start.

    It was another school rule that no pupils were to enter the large graveyard, as the old church was structurally unsoundand potentially dangerous. This only made the older children, only just in their teenage years, more eager to go out, along with the easily-led younger ones and those who didn’t want to lose face by being left behind.

    Although they had crept out of the school at night many times before wearing coats over their pyjamas and shoes over their thick socks, there was still a thrilling mixture of fear and excitement as they crept past the weather-beaten church. It was an intoxicating combination of the cold, knowing what would happen if they were found out, the dizzy tiredness that came from being up and awake in the early hours of the morning, and the inherent awe they felt at this ancient place of worship and burial.

    ‘Who’s up first?’ asked Nick, a spiky-black-haired thirteen-year-old and one of the ringleaders of the group, as the twenty-five children gathered into a circle by the roofless ruin of the church. ‘Beth?’

    ‘Not again,’ replied Bethany, a year younger than him but given an air of maturity by her glasses and long brown hair, ‘I always end up being first.’

    ‘I’ll do it,’ said Alice, a shy little ten-year-old, with a quiver in her voice.

    ‘Fine,’ said Nick snidely, ‘but you’d better not get scared and give the game away. We’ve been coming here for ages now, so don’t even think about running back and crying to the teachers, ’cos if you do I’ll –’

    ‘I won’t!’ she protested, interrupting him although he probably hadn’t thought of a suitable threat with which to finish his sentence.

    ‘What game are we gunna play?’ asked Mike, a skinny ten-year-old with an uncontrollable mop of ginger hair and a freckly-faced grin. He was eager to be running through the damp grass and the gravestones (though he planned to use his torch to guide his footsteps through the dark whenever he was sure no one was looking).

    ‘Who cares what we play?’ snapped John, Richard and Abigail’s classmate and shared best friend. ‘Let’s stop mucking around and get out there.’

    ‘Shut up, John,’ said Nick, always itching to have an argument with him, ‘You can go back inside if you don’t like all this “mucking around”.’

    ‘I’ll muck around with your face if we don’t get on with it soon,’ snarled John with unexpected savagery.

    ‘Stop it, Nick,’ said Abigail, throwing John a quick frown of anger and concern.

    John had been their best friend since they had first come to the boarding school five years ago, but as he’d entered his teens he’d become more and more restless and argumentative.

    ‘Let’s just play Scarecrow Tag,’ said Richard, ‘and stop arguing.’

    ‘Alright then,’ said Nick majestically, ‘Scarecrow Tag it is.’

    ‘It’s “tig”, not “tag”,’ protested Mike.

    ‘And I think “Stuck-in-the-Mud” sounds better,’ added Mei, a short-haired exchange student from China in Bethany’s year.

    ‘Tig, tag,’ said Nick sarcastically, ‘who cares what it’s called, let’s just play. Alice’s on first.’

    The little girl walked up to the ancient wooden door of the church, closed her eyes with a shiver of excitement, and began to count to fifty. Immediately the other children separated and moved off into the rows of gravestones, melting into the darkness in moments. Nick took a last look at Alice’s back, then at the stragglers, and then walked into the night with a smirk. He deliberately didn’t use his torch, showing off to anyone who was watching that he wasn’t scared of the dark.

     Richard and Abigail looked at each other and sighed at Nick’s behaviour. When the siblings turned around to ask John wherehe wanted to hide, they were surprised to see that he’d already gone. It was only the youngest and most frightened children left behind, those who Nick had bullied into coming along. Richard and Abigail smiled at them encouragingly before moving off towards an overgrown edge of the graveyard, quickly becoming one with the darkness under the creaking boughs of the trees.