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Once Charley had told him the whole story, Jerry knew he had to move quickly. What had Charley said? A week? That Peter had been gone for a week. No texts. His agent had the phone ringing off the hook trying to get answers. Charley had mentioned an antique book Peter found at an occult shop. When Charley had come over to investigate, Peter was nowhere to be found—just the book lying on the floor. Charley, clever boy, knew not to touch it. Instead he’d messaged Jerry for advice.
“Don’t touch it, who knows what kind of curse might be in there?” Jerry had told him.
Charley took Jerry’s advice and waited for Jerry to come grab the book and inspect it.
Arriving at the penthouse, Jerry flipped the heavy tome over in his hands. It was unremarkable and looked like any other old book. He’d come across something similar over the years but never personally owned such a book. He knew to tread lightly in the supernatural realm, respecting forces beyond his full comprehension.
“What do you think?” Charley asked, his voice trembling with anxiety. “You don’t think something bad happened to Peter, do you?”
Jerry didn’t answer immediately, focused on the spine of the book, which was bound in what appeared to be human skin. The pores in the leather were unsettling.
“Jerry?”
“What?”
“Is Peter going to be okay?”
“Well, it depends. This… is a pretty powerful book to have lying around. Did he say anything before he disappeared?”
“He said something about finding a zombie for his show…you think it could be related?”
Jerry considered this, looking between Charley and the book. He dragged a hand down his face tiredly and huffed. “Not the worst trouble he’s found himself in, but it’s up there.”
He advised Charley not to touch anything else in the penthouse and to stay put until Jerry messaged it was safe.
Jerry equipped himself with an axe, that had some heft to it, from Peter’s weapons gallery—vampire-safe, he hoped—and carefully wrapped the book in a throw.
Arriving back to his place, he brought the book to his study. Carefully opening the book, he studied what was written. The first few pages were written in cuneiform, which he had picked up in the 1800s but he had gotten rusty over the years. But the majority was Latin, which he knew. regnum tenebrarum… origo mali From what he could tell, this book was a gate to somewhere, a “realm of darkness”.
Jerry ripped a sleeve off his shirt and tearing a wound into his palm, he bled into the cloth until it was soaked with blood. He stuffed the wet scrap into his back pocket, grabbed the book, slung the axe over his shoulder and headed to the dugout foundation.
He threw the book open onto the dirt. Clambering onto the ceiling, he reached into his back pocket for the blood-soaked cloth and tied it tightly around a wooden rafter. He dropped from the ceiling onto the dirt on all fours, mentally preparing himself to open said ‘gate to the realm of darkness’.
He grimaced as he reopened the wound in his palm and dripped his own blood onto the worn yellow pages. He was not looking forward to whatever he was about to encounter.
“Find him,” he commanded, more to himself, as the blood seeped into the pages. A great force pushed him back as a rift opened in the space above the book.
“What the hell,” Jerry groaned as he crawled forward, righting himself and stepping through the rift.
He found himself in a dark forest, as expected. The realm of darkness lived up to its name.
Perpetual darkness. He wandered forward sensing a pull in his blood towards his right.
In a clearing, he saw a body nailed to a makeshift cross. As he approached, the body twitched. Jerry recognized the scent.
“Peter?”
Peter groaned, barely conscious. Jerry used the axe to pry the nails loose and helped Peter down, hurrying back to the rift.
“Hurry, he’s going to be back.”
“Who?”
“The big one,” just as Peter whispered that, Jerry sensed an overwhelming force approaching fast. He made a determined dash for the rift, barely escaping before shutting it behind them. Something told him that if he looked back, a monstrosity would have followed them through.
Jerry slammed the book shut. Leaving Peter on the ground momentarily, he retrieved the cloth from the rafters and set it on fire, ensuring nothing could follow them. He didn’t want anything to escape through, demons or otherwise.
Turning his attention back to Peter, he carried him over to a mattress in a secluded corner. He looked rough – bandaged up with nails and barbed wire embedded in him. Jerry carefully removed the barbed wire and tended to Peter, who screamed with each jagged cut.
When Jerry started to peel away the bandages, Peter shouted, “No, don’t!”
As Jerry removed a strip, Peter’s flesh sloughed off, exposing bone. Jerry had to think fast. He reopened the wound on his palm and pressed it against Peter’s arm, letting the black fluid work its magic. There was a cloud of steam as his blood reacted with Peter’s own. It healed slower than it would on his own body, but it was working.
Peter was drifting in and out of consciousness while Jerry pressed his palm against his stomach. He watched the blood pour through and let it work, seeping into Peter’s pores and fixing the damage. By the looks of it, Peter shouldn’t even be alive—there was a nail stuck where his heart should be.
Peter suddenly grabbed Jerry’s arm and bit into the meat of his hand. Jerry noted the sharpness of his teeth as he gnawed away. The effect was almost immediate, healing Peter’s dry cracked lips and renewing patches of reddened skin. The healed skin still appeared dull and as Jerry peeled the bandages away from his head, he was met with glowing red eyes. Peter’s hair was matted and damp with blood, and the smell. Jerry felt like he was at the butchers, the sight of viscera and the sharp acrid scent of blood almost overwhelming.
Peter dropped his grip on Jerry’s arm and released his hand from his mouth politely. He stayed silent while Jerry fussed over him and removed the rest of the bandages. Unfazed by Peter’s transgression, Jerry reached up to feel his forehead. Peter was burning up. He needed to cool him down somehow. Jerry got up to leave when Peter held onto his shirt.
“Just going to run a bath, I’ll only be in the next room.”
The hot water was working but there weren’t any lights. Jerry grabbed a candle from behind the bathroom mirror and lit it, standing it carefully near the tub. He started the water in the bathtub and kept it lukewarm. He returned to Peter and carried him to the bathroom. He sat Peter against a wall while he cut off the scraps of his jeans. Once he was done, he sank Peter slowly into the water, watching as the water turned a murky brown red before starting to bubble and then boil. That was strange, he thought as he scooped handfuls of water over Peter’s head. He washed out the blood, but the water never managed to run clear. His hair was longer than Jerry had remembered. In the candlelight, Peter’s hair was a flaming red, complimenting his new eyes. Peter wasn’t paying attention to anything, there was just a distant look in his eyes. He winced when Jerry dragged a towel over the raw skin. There were pink scars where the skin had healed over, but most of it would still take months to heal. He was careful around the spots where the nails were still stuck.
“Do you think you can stand?” Peter nodded.
Jerry returned with a large towel to wrap Peter in and carried him to a significantly less dilapidated room with a clean mattress. Jerry laid Peter out on the mattress and sat next to him on the side, but Peter begged to be held. Jerry complied, wrapping his arms around Peter, and kissed his temple. Jerry took a deep breath, his nose buried in Peter’s skin. Despite the corruption from that place, Peter’s scent remained unchanged.
“They’re going to come back for me, they’ll know where I am,” Peter whispered. “Every time I got away, thought I was safe, they’d find me again.”
“You’re safe here, nothing followed us. I would have sensed it,” Jerry started, “When you say they…”
“The dead,” Peter said matter-of-factly.
“And the big one?”
“The leader, he controls that place, the…,” Peter is reluctant to say the name.
“You don’t have to say it,” Jerry said, placing a hand over Peter’s. “I understand.”
Jerry twirled a lock of Peter’s hair absentmindedly, “I read the book and Charley filled me in on the rest. Looks like you bit off more than you could chew.”
“Yeah, went looking for a zombie and became one instead. Don’t rub it in,” Peter pouted, wincing as he shifted and a sharp pain shot through him from the nail in his chest. Jerry looked down. “Could we, maybe, get the nail out of my heart?”
Jerry laid Peter back on the bed, and pressed a hand against his chest. With his other hand he pinched the head of the nail between two fingers and pulled hard in one swift motion as Peter cried out. He pressed his hand against the wound to stop the bleeding. Peter caught him staring and spoke up.
“When they figured out I couldn’t die, they tortured me for days on end, found different ways to do it even, they tried to drown me in blood once… I could feel my arms and legs, rotting off, it was so painful I couldn’t even scream, and there were so many of them, like an army…”
“They can’t hurt you now,” Jerry replied while he chucked the nail into the garbage. Anger rose in him while Peter described his torture, at the thought that someone had dared to hurt his Peter. The amount of emotional and physical damage was evident in his eyes, the fact that Peter looked like he’d aged ten years. He picks a piece of debris out of Peter’s hair. “You’ve only been gone for a week.”
“A week? It felt like a whole year.”
“Time can be distorted in the realm of darkness.”
“Well, okay that clears everything up,” Peter says dryly, and chews on the inside of his mouth, the bleeding wound on his chest slowly stopping.
Peter falls on his side and curls up into a fetal position. Peter reaches out one hand and Jerry places his on top reassuringly. With his other hand he’s furiously texting Charley the good news.
“He’s fine, I can bring him by tomorrow.”
“That’s insane to hear. Thanks for rescuing him, Jerry.”
“No problem,” Jerry texted back. He hid his phone in a bedside drawer and laid down, Peter wrapped in his arms, while they dozed off.
Jerry rose out of bed to find Peter missing. Flexing his arm, he winced in pain when he noticed a large bruise forming where Peter had bit him. He must not have noticed while tending to Peter, but he was hit with a sudden realization that vampires didn't recover as fast when wounded by another. He puts the thought out of his head and resumes the search for Peter, whom he eventually finds in the dugout basement. It was still daylight out as he rubbed his eyes groggily. Peter was staring at a beam of sunlight.
“Jerry, watch,” Peter yelled enthusiastically, as he stuck his bare hand into the beam. His skin started to smoke immediately and burst into flames, “Shit, ow!”
Jerry ran over, shaking his head at Peter’s recklessness, “What was that supposed to prove?”
“That I might be a vampire!” Peter exclaimed, grinning.
“Let me take a look,” Jerry examined Peter’s hand. The skin was healing rapidly. There wasn’t any need to bandage it. “Don’t do that again.”
“Sorry, did I make you worried?”
Jerry held Peter’s chin and forced him to look up. His teeth were less sharp than yesterday, but Peter’s canines were lengthened. The stage magician had fangs. Maybe Peter was right.
“And look, I don’t show up,” Peter said, dragging Jerry over to the bathroom mirror, “See?”
Jerry looked into the mirror and saw nothing reflected back except an empty room.
“You’re happier about this than I expected.”
“Well, I’d rather be a Mediterranean vampire than a zombie,” Peter said, leaning in for a kiss.
Jerry kissed him for the first time since Peter returned from that hellscape, and for a moment he felt like everything was right with the universe.