From Vampire: A Morbid Initiation by Philippe Boulle.

©2002 White Wolf, Inc. All rights reserved.

Cairo, May, 1886

Beckett hadn’t expected laughter.

Ritual chants, perhaps. Or the screams of victims of unspeakable acts. Even simple conversation. But not laughter. He had come far enough, though, that he could hardly turn back now because of some madman’s unexpected mirth.

He dropped from the stone wall into the garden below and moved toward the house. The place was a shambles, long disused and the victim of at least one fire in the last decade. Once, this had been the home of a wealthy merchant, probably built in the early years of Mameluke rule, if Beckett was any judge of architecture. To hear the locals tell it, though, the last hundred years had not been good to this place—the Ottoman tax collector who had lived in the house in the middle of the last century had been murdered by the son of a farmer who’d been evicted from his land. The official’s body was never recovered since the murderer took the liberty of feeding him to street dogs. Beckett liked that image, but the story did not end there. The Arab murderer had been caught by the authorities and flogged before his execution. He supposedly pronounced a curse on those who dwelt in the house of the man who’d evicted his father. The next year, the Mameluke pasha who’d taken possession of the fine manse cut himself on a nail that protruded from one wall. The scratch became infected and ultimately gangrenous. His arm was amputated, but too late, and he died an agonizing death. His two wives both contracted a terrible withering disease shortly thereafter and died within another year. One of Napoleon Bonaparte’s aides took up residence there for a few months during the French occupation, but he grew palsied and left it for better lodgings.

From that point on the house stood empty, an oasis of quiet decay in the prosperous Bab al-Khalq district. The high walls that surrounded it on all sides kept out casual observers, but invited squatters and beggars in. None knew how many of these unfortunates lost their lives inside, because few even took note.

Beckett reckoned it was time to rectify that, regardless of the risks—or the laughter. He made his way through the tall grasses that had invaded the inner courtyard toward the smoke-blackened stone entryway. The moon was full and it bathed the area in wan light, but he knew a great many things could be hiding in the deep shadows. Crouching behind what had once been a well, he tried to join them.

Beckett’s contact in London, an antiquarian named Halim Bey, had sent him word that the British authorities had acquired a variety of artifacts that might be of interest. Beckett was a scholar and suffered from an insatiable desire to uncover the secrets of the past. Just like Heinrich Schliemann had at Troy and Mycenae and Alphonse Mariette had at Memphis, he sought to peel back the layers of time. That Beckett, like the subjects of his chosen field of research, was what folklore variously called "undead" or "vampire" only made his existence that much more interesting.

Tonight was certainly a case in point. In all likelihood the British archeologists who had collected relics from a tomb just east of Luxor had thought the unique designs hinted at a heretofore unknown dynasty or cult. Beckett, on the other hand, had recognized in the hieroglyphics reproduced from the tomb in the head researcher’s notebooks several passages referring to aspects of the vampiric condition: the desire for blood, the fear of the sun, and so forth. This told him that the relics themselves were worth inspecting. Unlike the researcher and his notes, however, these had not returned to England, and so Beckett set off for Egypt. He had not been surprised to find that the artifacts had disappeared by the time he got there. The hieroglyphs also spoke of a variety of rituals and although Beckett was no sorcerer, he understood that ritual magic was no more superstition than vampirism was. It was rare, but it existed.

Some of the mundane pieces in the stolen collection ended up on the black market and from there Beckett had been able to find the seller, a boy named Fahd Benezra. He’d watched Fahd for several nights, and the boy always came back to this abandoned house.

* * *

Anwar al-Beshi smiled. There was a fissure running through the earthen tile of the home’s central room. It had started as a simple nick in the center-most tile, just another random mark of the passage of time in this old dwelling. Then, while he made the first preparations for tonight’s rite, it had graduated to a crack.

With the first incantations to the storm and shadow, the crack had grown, spreading first to one and then to many other tiles. When the first slave, the Arab man Fahd, knelt in the northeastern part of the room, making obeisance to a specific place in the western desert, other cracks had appeared, joining their progenitor and becoming the dark, jagged line that now split the room in twain.

"Her blessings upon us." Anwar’s voice was a reverent whisper. He nodded to the other slave, the Englishwoman Emma. She stood in the north, aligning herself with the power of the Great Nile itself. Fahd whispered invocations in a language all but dead centuries before the first Arab invader came to the Delta.

Emma shed her simple dyed-cotton robe to expose the marks of the Goddess’s favor. She took seven deliberate steps southward, the fissure widening with each one. Anwar placed a small golden plate and scalpel at her feet. On the plate was a shriveled, petrified gray mass, whose shape implied something organic. Neither Emma nor Fahd would consider questioning its nature or import—the master treated it with reverence and so blessed it was.

Anwar looked up at his fair-skinned chattel, handed her the scalpel, and nodded. Emma took the thin, sharp blade in her right hand, holding her index finger along its dull edge for stability. She looked up at the stars twinkling down through the ruin of the old house’s roof, placed the tip of the blade at the top of her sternum, and pulled down.

The blade ran along her bone, sending jolts of ecstatic agony through her. Red, hot lifeblood welled from the incision, forming like a crimson river in the valley of her milky breasts. It flowed down her stomach, to her pubis and along her left thigh. Blood collected on the underside of her slight belly and in the folds of her sex, before falling in thick droplets to the plate waiting under her.

The first drop hit the withered organ on its tip, others soon covering it in a red sheen. The first wisp of smoke rose from the crack and it smelled of great pestilence.

His broad smile exposing snake-like canines, Anwar al-Beshi laughed anew.

* * *

Well, that was enough of that.

Crouched in the shadows that gathered amid the ruined remains of the top floor of the home, Beckett had a good view of the ritual going on downstairs. He’d just watched thus far, taking notes and looking for an easy opportunity to gather what he needed to. But now, things seemed to be going too far.

Beckett generally disliked blood sorcerers, but they were an occupational hazard and he hadn’t expected the goings-on to be especially bothersome. He’d given up using ghouls long ago, but most of his ilk still fed their blood to a choice few living slaves to serve as majordomos, daylight guardians and attendants. He’d guessed that Fahd was one such slave and it was nice to be proven right—sorcerers were, if anything, more likely to have need of such seconds.

The flow of blood streaming down the nude woman’s chest was a bit more problematic. Its rich odor called to the hungry beast that had sat in Beckett’s breast ever since he took his last breath. But one did not survive as a vampire for as long as he had without being able to control the urge to feed. And the woman was obviously long gone into the addled servitude and ritual requirements of her bondage—her pale skin was marked with a delicate pattern of scars emanating from her shorn crotch and highlighted by the blood that clung to the white puckers of tissue. She was long past any compassion that might still linger in Beckett’s heart.

No, what pushed him to act was the smell. It rose from the cracked tile like a pillar of smoky bile, rotting the very air in the room. Beckett’s nostrils flared and the noxious stuff curled into his disused lungs. Undeath had sharpened his senses in countless ways, but now he regretted it. His chest convulsed in a dry heave, trying to expel the pestilence within.

Simultaneously, the vermin began to call to him. Beckett was a thing of the night and had long ago discovered he had a unique empathy for the other beasts who made it their home. Now, he heard the buzzing of flies and gnats emerging from the crack, the scurry of beetles and locusts flocking from miles around, and the scrabbling of rats crawling from under rocks to feed on the carrion to come.

He jumped down.

* * *

The intruder ruined everything. Anwar was pronouncing the twenty-third of the seventy-five secret names when he barreled in from above. Tall and stocky, he slammed into Anwar and strong-armed Emma to the ground.

"Apologies for the interruption," he said. An Englishman it seemed, fair-skinned and brown-haired. He wore heavy cotton pants, a leather jacket, heavy boots and an infantile smile.

Anwar focused his attention on the man, trying to peel back any and all lies this one might have shrouded around himself. His instincts for such things, sharpened by years of moving unseen through the bazaars of North Africa, told Anwar that this one was a blood-drinker too, a vampire, though unlikely to be a child of the Dark God.

Fahd sensed his master’s anger and responded unbidden. Rising silently, he drew a large flat blade from under his robe and moved to attack. Anwar appreciated the effort, of course, but he knew it was futile. The boy got to within two steps of the intruder before the man pivoted on his left foot and struck out with his right hand. Anwar watched in mild fascination as the man’s fingers sprouted terrible, animalistic talons, which raked across Fahd’s chest. A jet of the boy’s blood splashed against the eastern wall an instant before he collapsed.

This foreigner was an excellent killer, and despite everything, Anwar appreciated that.

"You should run," the stranger said. His voice had lost its flippant mirth and came out a rough growl. He held up his hand, now dripping with Fahd’s blood, and his lips curled back to reveal thick fangs. "Now."

"If only things were that simple, khawaga." Anwar noted with more than a little chagrin that the great fissure had already sealed itself. All that remained was a pattern of hairline fractures in the tiled floor. The ritual was irrevocably ruined and he could feel the effects working upon him already. "In such things, a price must always be paid."

The foreigner must have expected an attack because he kicked out at Anwar with a strength that spoke of potent blood indeed. The sorcerer took the blow to the chest and fell back several yards away, feeling bones break and organs rend within him. Experienced with the mystic ways, he wasn’t terribly shocked to see the subtle marks of fate reveal themselves to him.

"Give my regards to the Lady," he said, sure that the stranger had no idea just whom he had served this night. Then, he propped himself up with his weakening arms and his torso, riddled with the dry tumors and bleeding cancers that had emerged when the ritual was ruined, gave way and separated from his shattered pelvis.

The darkness took him then, and Anwar al-Beshi rotted away with a smile on his face.

* * *

Beckett took some time to survey the ritual chamber. The woman he’d tackled was unconscious but breathing. Assuming she had been tied to the main ritualist, she was probably in for a rough patch. Vampiric blood was highly addictive to the living and when the vampire in question was destroyed it left the mortal bereft and alone. Fahd, who’d led him here, was good and dead, and the ritualist himself was just a pile of ash now.

But that didn’t mean the room wasn’t of interest. Beckett gathered up what artifacts he could and then examined the walls in detail. The ritualist had decorated it with a complex series of hieroglyphs that seemed to be a continuation of the ones Beckett had lifted from the notebook in London. The central image took up the entirety of the east wall, right where the sorcerer had been performing his rite. It was of a female figure, in the typical twisted profile of hieroglyphs, sitting on a throne. What was interesting about this woman, though, was that instead of a head, she had a black disc on her shoulders. Except for its color, it might be a solar image, because it had long rays reaching out to a variety of smaller figures. These were human males—probably servants—who bore large animal heads on their shoulders. It was these heads that were connected by black rays to the woman’s head-disc.

Beckett had never seen this figure before, but some instinct told him it was worth remembering. He was making a sketch of it when the shooting started.

When the bullet dug into his shoulder, Beckett cursed himself for getting distracted. He turned around—the shot hurt, but it would take a lot more than that to stop him—and saw a middle-aged man in the uniform of a British cavalry regiment. He was holding a smoking pistol.

"Get away from my wife!" he said in English.

"Be careful, Colonel Blake," came a second voice, this time with a heavy Egyptian accent. "It is a devil." The Arab with the gift for hyperbole was a religious man, dressed in flowing traditional robes. He was holding a simple torch, which cast flickering light in the room.

This is getting out of hand, Beckett decided. He grabbed the satchel in which he had placed the major artifacts and ran. Blake shot him again as he jumped up and through a high window, but that didn’t stop him.

One more strange story from the colonies.