Salome: Episode 15.
There was something outside at night. Hunting. Taunting us. It wanted us to look for it.
Welcome to Episode 15 of Salome. This is a Gothic Horror novel set in the 1880s and introduces Sister Salome, a young Italian nun who will appear in the 3rd Muldoon book. I started this serial to help you get to know her before the events of the next novel.
A stranger comes to help, but Salome didn’t ask, and she doesn’t know if she can trust him.
I found myself spying on my superiors more and more. I heard them discussing something that I knew was horrible. I only caught words, but if one can paint a picture that represents the full range of colours from only red, green and blue, one can piece together clippings to make a story. I did not need to know the details. Their hushed voices and the fear emitting from Mother Hildegard’s office fed my insatiable curiosity.
There was something outside at night. Hunting. Taunting us. It wanted us to look for it.
First, a woman who we’d cared for at the hospital had been killed, her body parts left on the altar of St Vincent de Pauls’ church. Then, an infant, cold as the stone of the steps it had been left on, devoid of blood. They hid it from me, but I knew. I saw them in my mind’s eye. I saw that I couldn’t save them. I cried in my bed until I was sick, then I cried again, disappointed by my apparent weakness. What would my tears do for murdered innocents? I hated myself for my uselessness. It was easy to hate the reflection of my blotchy, pathetic face as it struggled to control its emotions.
“The Devil wants you to surrender,” I heard Mother Hildegard in the back of my head. That was where she seemed to live now, permanently. “He wants to break you. He wants you to give up.” It would have been easy to give up. It would have been comfortable. Looking away would have been a blessing. But that was not my duty. I splashed my face at the basin and vowed to hunt my tormentor in my dream, should it return.
The hooded figure waited for me in the same place, every time. The moment it vanished made me scream with frustration. I could stay awake all night and resist it happening again, or I could find another way to fight it. “Learn what you can from it,” Father John said. “Take it all in. Every small detail.” But I did not want to sit and study. I wanted to grab the candelabra and burn the church down. I wanted to watch the hooded figure burn, too. I did not want the dream, so I would endeavour to find an end to it.
I slept easily, tired from my training. My shivering muscles loosened as I fell into the abyss, my body soft and heavy in the mattress.
I stalked the same house, in the same hills, with the same fields. What was there to learn from visiting the same dream so many times?
It frustrated me, to the point where I’d developed a general intolerance for conversation outside of my lessons. I knew what was coming after the day had ended. I endured.
“Never converse with the demon,” Father John said.
But I did… In Turin. Perhaps it was too late for lessons.
“Never do it again,” he said. “It was a lesson. Learn from it.”
It was taunting me. The dream. What did it want?
I entered my little house each time, the beds in the same place, the empty rooms and dust-ridden furniture, like a blank canvas waiting for my fingerprints again. The figure behind the curtain, always out of reach. “Come out!” I called. “Show yourself!”
Then one night, another voice answered.
“Who are you?”
Like Sister Catherine, but a man. Not the hooded figure. Someone else. Unthreatening.
“Tell me who you are first.”
And that was when I lost him. Every time. I would not tell him who I was, but I tortured myself with questions. If he had been a demon, wouldn’t he have known my name anyway? I ran through all of these questions until my feet cramped from the incessant stomping up and down the hilly streets of this riverside city, its cool winds chilling the sweat on the back of my neck before it could run. When would this end? I marched on.
“Whoa there. Steady,” someone said as I crashed headlong into a mass of black wool. A suitcase clattered on the pavement, but it did not burst open. I jolted back and looked up.
“Are you all right, Sister?” The early morning sun silhouetted him, and I could not see his face.
I froze. His voice. So familiar. He was still speaking, but the palpitations surged into my ears, my throat, even at the back of my eyes. He reached out to support me, but was too slow.
I grabbed my skirts and I ran.
Collapsing behind the main door of the convent, I panted and wiped the sweat from my brow. Sister Bridget came running down the corridor and fell to her knees, asking me over and over again what had happened.
“The dream,” I said, still fighting for breath. “He’s coming for me.”
“What?” Sister Bridget asked, “Salome, what is it?”
“He’s out there. He’s come to find me.”
She held me, and in response to the immediate comfort that came with the safe arms of any mother-figure, I wept.
The doctor came again, administering something to help me sleep. I screamed, “No, please no,” as I drifted off, helpless. The last I saw of Mother Hildegard was her pensively holding her chin as I closed my eyes. Damn you all, I thought, feeling my muscles loosen as the soft bed absorbed my weight.
“Who are you?” the shadow behind the window asked.
I stiffened, standing there. “Who are you?”
He sighed. “If you won’t speak to me in the flesh, we’ll have to do it here.”
“I don’t trust you.”
He laughed. “That’s fair, given the circumstances.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked, waiting inside the house. I heard his footsteps cross the board of the front step before I saw him. It was the same man. Dressed in a black suit, but he was not a priest. He removed his hat and gave a slight bow.
I remained still.
“I’m hunting down a vampire,” he said. “And you?”
An Irishman. He sounded like Sister Catherine. I looked around for her, and wondered if she could talk here, too. “How is this possible?” I asked.
He shrugged slightly. “You know that old phrase, God works in mysterious ways? I find it helps with things like this.” He regarded me for a moment, his chin turned up slightly. “Do you all look like little boys under the veils, Sister?”
I patted down my head with my hands, and realised I wasn’t wearing my habit. I was bare-headed, wearing my nightdress and robe. He sighed, “Forgive me. I shouldn’t tease.”
He was older than me, his hair almost black, or perhaps it was black—this was a dream after all. He stood at least a foot taller, and looked around the house as though he was seeing it for the first time. I peered outside, and the sky was calm. No howling, no fear, no wolves. I remained still, perplexed by the stillness of the world around me.
“Any clues as to what’s going on here?” he asked, watching me.
The words came without passing through my mind first. “The vampyre is in the church.”
“What church?”
“Up on the hill,” I said, pointing. He shook his head.
“Looks like I’ve reached the limits of my vision, Sister.” He stepped back into the front garden of the cottage. “You’ll have to show me.”
I stepped out and stood in front of him for a moment, the blades of grass tickling my bare feet. If my gut was my guardian angel, it had changed course. Now it was telling me to trust him, and lead him to the church. I gestured for him to follow me, wondering if the ground revealed itself to him with every step he took. “What can you see ahead, sir?”
“An abyss, Sister.”
So different, I thought. “You are not a priest?”
“No.” I turned to look at him and caught him studying the fireflies that swarmed the marshes at the foot of the hill. He caught me watching and raised his eyebrows. “I’ve never seen these before.” He placed a couple of fingers on his hat, trying to keep it in place as the wind blew down at us.
“Lucciola. Fireflies,” I said. He nodded and continued to follow me up the steep hillside. The lights were on as they always were, my body gravitating toward them, rendering me as impulsive as the moth. I picked up the lantern that rested on my parents’ grave. “You know them?” he asked.
“My parents,” I said.
He said nothing, and followed to the steps of the church door. I heard him suck air through his teeth. “What is it?” I asked.
“Blood on the lintel.”
“Yes,” I said, “the remains of a lamb are inside. I think it was some sort of Black Mass.”
He groaned. “Show me inside, Sister, if you wouldn’t mind.”
We entered, the creaking of the heavy doors echoing across the empty church. My shoulders sagged.
“What is it?”
“The vampyre,” I said. “It’s gone.”
“I have that effect on the undead,” he said, a corner of his mouth rising faintly. I did not understand him. Did he want me to laugh? Even at a moment like this? I took a deep breath and thought better of it. This place did not carry the same heaviness for him as it did for me. How was he to know that?
“Usually he is here, and he tells me to stay.”
“Why?”
“I do not know. Once, he grabbed my arm, and my skin was scratched when I woke up.”
The man said nothing, and now that he was equipped with the full view of the church, he gently stepped past me and went to the bones on the floor, squatting down to study them, turning them over in his hands.
“Not a Black Mass,” he said. “Or at least, it didn’t start that way.”
“What is it?”
“A sacrificial lamb.” He looked up at me. ”Its blood was used for protection.”
My heart caught in my throat. Of course: a familiar story. “The destroyer?”
He shook his head. “Possibly, but it can also be used to keep demons out…”
“They can enter churches.”
He nodded ruefully. “They can. At least, until there’s a deterrent. Lamb’s blood can do it, and it did for a time.”
“This isn’t just a vampyre?”
He stood up and pushed his jacket back, placing his hands in his trouser pockets. “This makes things slightly more difficult.”
“It does?”
“Yes,” he sighed. He didn’t share any other details.
I sat down in the nearest pew, my head heavy. He turned to study the altar. “Have you seen this before?” he asked, nodding to it.
The painted face looking down on us from the altar at first looked like that of La Madonna, but her curled lips and wicked grin assured me it was not La Madonna. “Lilith,” I whispered. Her waves of dark hair rested on bare shoulders, her breasts slightly exposed, but not in order to feed the Christ child resting on her hip. She held nothing but contempt.
“Aye.”
If a woman is a daughter of Eve, the vampyress is a daughter of Lilith… But this was a man. I saw him.
“I called him Papa.”
“Who?”
“The hooded figure with the long nails who grabbed me. He felt so familiar. I thought for a second that it was my Papa.”
“And it wasn’t?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Papa died when I was very young. I never saw him on his deathbed.”
The man rubbed his chin for a moment, lost in thought. He ran his fingers along the pews, the echo of his footsteps bouncing off the walls and the vaulted ceiling. “You’re from here?” he asked.
I shrugged, looking around. “This is my church. This is where I grew up. You first met me in my house.”
“What else has it said to you?”
“Just that I should stay.”
“Hmm.” His silence was frustrating. He continued to study the church, the altar and the bones on the floor. I wondered what was going on in his head. Whatever it was, he wasn’t sharing it with me.
My leg bounced, forcing me back to my feet. “Can we go now?” I asked.
He raised his dark eyebrows and looked at me, as though he’d forgotten I’d been there the entire time.
“No, not just yet. You’re all right.”
I didn’t know what that meant. He turned away from me and continued with his inspection of the church. “Please, we should go,” I said.
“We’ve only just arrived.”
“Please. I want to go,” I pleaded, the walls coming closer as I struggled for breath. I felt my eyes water as his hand struck my cheek.
“Sister! Oi, hang on. Stay with me!” he said, shaking me.
Ways to support this fiction newsletter.
As well as the option to upgrade your subscription to paid, I do also have books that you can purchase as well as a ko-fi and paypal.
If you’re enjoying Salome, you really would enjoy The Muldoon Mysteries series. There are currently two books (standalones) in this series. Click the image below to find out more about them, and find them on Tiny Worlds.
My books are now available at Tiny Worlds
I love the way you didn't even need to tell us the bloke's name. We all know who he is.
Yay! They meet. No undead will be safe now…