Kronos Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Foreword by Brian Clemens

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘What manner of monster can wreak such damage? I only hope you know how it can be stopped.’

  The peace of an English village is shattered when a young girl withers before her friend’s eyes, becoming but dust and bones. Witnessing this terrifying transformation, local physician Dr Marcus fears the village has been cursed by the presence of evil. He immediately summons his old army friend, the mysterious but powerful vampire hunter, Kronos.

  Together with the help of his assistant Professor Grost, Kronos has dedicated his whole life to destroying vampires. He knows that there is nothing so varied and deadly. With a vampire nothing is certain, especially how one might be able to kill it.

  As more and more villagers fall prey to this deadly curse, time is against him. And when it comes dangerously close to home, Kronos is faced with a terrible choice…

  About the Author

  ‘Guy Adams is either barking mad or a genius, I haven’t decided.’ Mark Chadbourn

  The author of the novels The World House and its sequel Restoration, Guy Adams gave up acting five years ago to become a full-time writer. This was silly, but thankfully he’s kept busy, writing bestselling humour titles based on TV show Life on Mars or Torchwood novels The House That Jack Built and The Men Who Sold The World.

  He has also written a pair of original Sherlock Holmes novels, The Breath of God and The Army of Doctor Moreau as well as a biography of actor Leonard Rossiter and an updated version of Neil Gaiman’s Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  His website is: www.guyadamsauthor.com

  Foreword by Brian Clemens

  BACK IN THE 1970s I had just finished writing and producing Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde for Hammer, who then asked me to write and direct a vampire movie. Not a great fan of the genre, I immediately ran several of their previous films on the subject and came to the conclusion that the villain was the most compelling character, there was a lack of humour and, worst of all, they all seemed to have the same storyline – always ending up with poor Christopher Lee being staked through the heart. It really needed some fresh air and hence I created Kronos, which is Greek for ‘time’, because anticipating a series of movies, I left myself free to move through different time eras if necessary. I also created a whole new vampire lore, again giving myself room to vary the format and introduce some variety – plus humour here and there.

  Kronos was a kind of Marvel comics hero, with some touches that made him hip in younger eyes. I had some grandiose ideas that budget prevented me using, such as I wanted Kronos to travel in a golden coffin – on the basis that to fight your enemy you have to think, feel and know him.

  The movie was barely promoted but, I am happy to say, has since become a cult, and a recent celebration screening in London saw a full house and others queuing around the block to obtain autographs … and now, at last, in the capable hands of Guy Adams, Kronos is back! The novel is exciting, remains true to the original concept and, who knows, may herald another movie? I hope so.

  I guess that if enough of you fans (and your friends) buy enough copies of this book, you will have done your bit to make it happen. Thanks.

  August 2011

  One

  Petra Is Dying

  I’M DYING. IT may not look like it as I sit here amongst the late cover of campion flowers, but I am dying. We all are.

  Dearest Ann is combing my hair and the sunshine throws flashes in the small mirror that I’m holding. I can see my face in the mirror. It is a good face, a beautiful face. That sounds horribly conceited but it would be pointless to lie. I’m lucky: I was born with a face that makes others do what I want. That’s the greatest gift God can give.

  Despite its beauty, the face is what makes me realise I’m dying. Looking at it, I can remember when it was smaller, chubbier, covered in freckles. I hated those freckles. It seems no time at all since Ann and I were running through these woods. Chasing, laughing, climbing trees. Now we sit and obsess on each other’s beauty and the only thing we chase are boys (and they’re only too happy to be caught). When did those freckles vanish? When did I? Our lives are like summers, that’s what I think – they burn hot and become winter before you know it. I’m dying. We all are.

  Ann runs off into the trees to find flowers for my hair. I watch her go. Sweet Ann: if only she knew she was just as pretty as me. She is always the quiet one, the one who hangs back a few steps, the one who thinks she could never quite stand shoulder to shoulder with me. Would I want it any other way? Oh God, I hope so – am I that vain?

  A light breeze passes through the trees, the ghost of winter come to visit. It won’t be a ghost much longer. Just a few short weeks and the cold will come, the flowers will die, the leaves will fall and the mornings will start in darkness. We’ll be breaking the ice on the water troughs so that the cows can drink.

  I lean back against the tree, feeling the rough bark pressing red brands into my skin. The sunlight falls in thin shards, like a broken mirror, through the branches around me. I feel dreamy. I press back against the bark harder still, wanting to keep focused on the here and now as my mind threatens to wander away on the newfound chill in the air.

  There are footsteps behind me, a crunch of leaves and a crack of twigs. I decide that I will tell Ann how beautiful she is, maybe even curl the flowers she has picked into her own hair rather than mine. I turn and smile at her but it’s not Ann, it’s someone just as beautiful, someone with a face that makes me do what it wants.

  I lift my head and the hair that Ann has so carefully brushed catches in the wind and makes a grab for freedom even as that beautiful mouth descends on mine. I sink into a dream of dead summers from which I’ll never wake.

  Two

  Dr Marcus Feels the Devil

  I ALWAYS DREAM of ambushes. Even here, in the warm and beautiful forest that I have loved these last few years, I imagine every ditch and shadow to b
e filled with the enemy. Their swords are drawn, they’re waiting to pounce. The next moment, the very next one, will bring blood and fear. Such is the effect of war on a man.

  The fighting has been over – for me at least – for nearly eight years. Now I am a country doctor. My patients suffer from aches and vapours, not musket-shot and knife wounds. Ireland is distanced by more than the sea: it is a country and a battlefield lost to time. And yet, still, I can remember the sound of cannon fire, the smell of gunpowder and blood. I find myself tensed, teeth grinding, eyes closed, waiting for the killing blow when no such blow can possibly fall. I suspect that the effects of war are nigh on incurable.

  There are no foreign soldiers lurking in wait as I encourage my horse around a bend in the track. Nobody drops down from the branches above, a knife in their teeth. The slight creaking I can hear is the wind pressing the wood of the trees, not the strain of leather gauntlets as fingers pull back a bowstring.

  I will survive this journey.

  I know this.

  God, how I wish I knew this.

  ‘Ann?’ The girl is standing in the middle of the track, staring into the trees as if she has fallen asleep on her feet. I recognise her, of course – a doctor knows everybody, he brings them into the world and sends them back out again. ‘Ann, are you all right?’

  She gives no sign of having heard me, just stands there, eyes unblinking.

  I tie up the horse – poor reluctant Jenny, getting old enough now for every journey to be a chore rather than a pleasure – and walk over to Ann. She gives no sign of being aware of my presence. I could be no more solid than the breeze (which seems to have grown stronger since I dismounted, pulling dead leaves in cords around my ankles as if hoping to trip me up).

  All of a sudden I become convinced that the war has shown me nothing. That the very worst that can be witnessed in this world is about to show itself here and now. I have no idea where this sudden conviction comes from: is it something glimpsed in Ann’s eyes? Is it yet another hangover from the war? Wherever it hails from, it’s all-consuming. Something terrible is coming. It will make pretty daisies of the red, battlefield flowers of an Irish field, those thick splayed petals that blossom from a man’s ribcage when the cannon has found its mark. It will turn that smell of singed meat and burned straw that hung over the torched villages into the clean freshness of a Christmas wind. There is something here, something so awful that I will die to see it. I have no idea where this certainty comes from but, once gripped, I cannot imagine being free. I have survived this long but no more. Death, laughing, has finally found me on the quiet tracks of this fair woodland.

  ‘Ann?’ I ask once more, the sound of my voice almost terrifying enough to force a scream from me. ‘Ann, what is it?’

  I look over my shoulder, following her gaze, and understand what it is that has struck her insensible.

  Dear God, what have we done to bring such madness here?

  Three

  A Footman’s Final Thoughts

  MY NAME,’ SAYS the small hunchback as he leans over me, ‘is Professor Herbert Grost. This may seem small recompense given your current situation’ – and he’s right, my life is bleeding hot onto the stone steps beneath me and I find I don’t altogether care – ‘but we do try not to kill the innocent.’

  ‘Urggh,’ I reply, which is as much as can be expected of me in the circumstances.

  Loud noises begin to echo from the entrance hall and out onto the front step.

  Grost loads a flintlock pistol and turns towards the open doorway. He fires the gun and then returns his attention to me while he reloads. ‘But sometimes you just have to think of the greater good,’ he says. ‘I mean, jobs aren’t easy to come by, I know that, but if you’re working for the forces of evil you’ve made a choice, haven’t you? Every man needs to eat but does he think first of his soul or of his belly?’

  I’d known the answer to that once. Of course I had. Given how things have worked out for me I might have been wrong, of course.

  Grost turns and fires the pistol again. He shouts into the hall: ‘No, please don’t thank me – he was only about to put that axe in your pretty blond head, after all.’

  There is a reply but I can’t hear it. Something flies past my line of vision, something small, round and dripping. It takes me a second to recognise it as the head of Gerry Kaveney, one of the stablehands. I’d been drinking with Gerry only three nights ago, talking about the usual stuff: how many new students had enrolled, how long they would last …

  ‘Take the current situation,’ continues Grost. ‘I don’t care how many mouths you have to feed, using a finishing school to fill the bed of a succubus is hard to justify. What had these poor girls done to deserve such an ignoble death? Poor innocents …’

  You’d be surprised, I think. They’d been heartless bitches, most of them. Never a polite word or a kind smile for a working man.

  ‘So,’ Grost continues, moving out of my eyeline for a moment as he walks back to the coach they’d arrived in. Nice-looking vehicle, I’d thought, expecting yet another pampered student-to-be rather than a sword blade in my belly. ‘When we heard about this place from one of the poor grieving parents, well, we could hardly stand by and let things continue. Once it became clear that the entire teaching staff were revenants under the control of the elusive Madame Loubrette …’ Grost returns, carrying a small wooden crate, ‘Oh … it was us that took your geography teacher, by the way – in order to gather information, you understand.’ He looks ruminative. ‘He would have appreciated the irony in his eventual death, I imagine,’ he says. ‘He was certainly spread far and wide.’

  The noises from inside have been receding for a while as the other man – the one who looked like a Prussian, the one with the bloody sword – moves deeper inside the building.

  ‘Anyway,’ Grost says, shifting the case in his hands so that it’s easier to carry, ‘having discovered how easy it would be to deal with the lot of you we thought we’d better just get on with it. The Captain’s a busy man – places to ransack, creatures to stake, I’m sure you can imagine.’ Grost tuts and then shakes his head. ‘And to think that Cromwell fought for a ‘pure’ and holy England. Things are worse now then ever. There’s nothing the devil feeds off better than a puritanical heart … enforced abstinence makes for a sinful world.’ He looks down at me and, quite absurdly, smiles. ‘Politics, eh? See you in a moment,’ he says. ‘If you’re still alive, that is.’

  Grost disappears inside the house and for a couple of minutes I listen to the sounds and try to imagine what’s happening. Then my mind begins to wander and I think about home, about the small fishing village where I grew up. I can see the billowing sails and smell the tang of the lobster pots. I can’t help but wonder at what point my life took such a downward turn. How had that young boy, gazing up at the masts and dreaming of the boundless sea, come to this? I cough, and feel something wet splutter onto my chin.

  A sudden harsh scream brings my attention back to the present. Madame Loubrette is flung through the open doorway, sailing over my head and coming to a harsh landing on the driveway just beyond my field of vision. They found her, then, I think. Down there in the cellars. Down there in the dark.

  There is another flash of movement and I realise that the Prussian has returned. It takes a moment for me to recognise him, due to the streaks of blood running through his hair and smeared across his face. He looks like a newborn.

  ‘A little fresh air!’ he shouts. ‘To brush away the cobwebs.’

  Madame Loubrette screams as Grost sits next to me. There is a hissing noise, then a soft punching sound, like the breath of a large pair of bellows.

  ‘Ah,’ says Grost, ‘she’s a pure-breed nightwalker! Thought as much: who wants to live in a cellar unless they have to? All those spiders and … Those little things …’ He waggles his fingers at his mouth, miming ‘horrible thing’ like you would to a baby in its cot. ‘What do you call them? Live under rocks. And in miserable cel
lars. Never mind. Doesn’t matter, point is you wouldn’t want to live with them, would you?’ The screaming continues, getting harsher, as if Madame Loubrette is short of breath. ‘Makes it much easier from our point of view – very short fight. You never can tell, though: sometimes sunlight kills them, sometimes it just makes them angry. Sometimes …’ He looks down and smiles at me as if we’re old friends. ‘You won’t believe this but I swear I saw it with my own two eyes – sometimes sunlight has no effect at all. Kronos and I once stumbled upon a bloodsucker actually sitting out in the midday heat. He was getting a tan! The ladies do so like a tan …’

  A smell of burning meat and hair wafts over and I briefly wonder if I’m hallucinating. Dreaming of the dark days of a couple of years ago when the Witchfinder was about his business. Then Grost’s words make sense and I realise what must be happening to Madame Loubrette.

  ‘Talking of tans,’ says Grost, ‘she’s darkening wonder fully. I give her two minutes before she’s as crisp as an autumn leaf.’

  I try and speak again, but the fragile breath builds into a harsh cough and once more bloody phlegm splatters my chin.

  ‘Try and relax,’ Grost says. ‘Soon be over.’

  There is one final scream from Madame Loubrette. I close my eyes. I am cold.

  ‘Next time,’ says Grost, in a voice that now seems to be coming from miles away, ‘because you never can tell with God, maybe there will be a next time …’ I try and hold onto these words, as if they’re coins dropping through my fingers, or sand pouring from the open hands of a young boy as he listens to the sounds of sails flapping in the wind. ‘Try and make better choices. In my experience, we tend to get what we deserve.’

  Oh God, I think, this is it, I’m dying …

  ‘Who’s your friend?’ the Prussian asks, wiping at the blood on his brow before it drips into his eyes.

  Grost shrugs. ‘I didn’t think to ask his name.’