Dream the Crow's Black Dream - A Tale of Vampires Book Four Read online

  Dream the Crow’s Black Dream

  A Tale of Vampires – Book 4

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  FICTION

  Dark Winter: The Wicca Circle (2013)

  Stormling (Book One of the Mordana Chronicles) (2014)

  Dark Winter: Crescent Moon (2014)

  Murderous Little Darlings: A Tale of Vampires: I (2014)

  The Blood and the Raven: A Tale of Vampires: II (2015)

  Innocent While She Sleeps: A Tale of Vampires: III (2015)

  The Ghost of Normandy Road: Haunted Minds I (coming 2015)

  Clara’s Song: Haunted Minds II (coming 2015)

  Dark Winter: Last Rites (coming 2015)

  NON-FICTION

  The Essence of Martial Arts (2011)

  The Essence of Martial Arts: Revised Edition (2012)

  The Essence of Martial Arts: Special Edition (2013)

  Buy on Amazon – Kindle Version

  Buy on Amazon – Print Version

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2015 John Hennessy

  Cover and back design © Images courtesy of Depositphotos.com

  Typography © John Hennessy

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems – except in the case of brief quotations in articles or reviews – without the permission in writing from its publisher, John Hennessy.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. The author is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2015.

  Text copyright John Hennessy 2015

  The right of John Hennessy to be identified as the author of this work is asserted by him.

  ISBN-13: 978-1508479406 (CreateSpace-Assigned)

  ISBN-10: 1508479402

  A CIP Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade of otherwise, be lent, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author, John Hennessy.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Inspiration for Dream the Crow’s Black Dream

  People who suffer from déjà vu, or those who sometimes have dreams in their waking day, can have difficulty knowing what is reality, and what is not.

  In creating this story, our ‘hero’ is under great pressure. He has designs on advancing in his career, and is looking to wed his long time girlfriend. He hopes, as we all do, that the bad events from our past, stay in the past.

  In marrying Rosalyn, he finally feels he can move on from Daisy. But her killer is not about to make him forget his part in her demise.

  Dreams are complicated things. We can never truly know what they mean. Are we supposed to act on them, or perhaps do the opposite?

  Seth decides he has to do something, even though he could lose everything he has worked for in his adult life.

  Perhaps you’ll root for him, and want him to win. Perhaps you’ll curse him for not dealing with the vampire before now. But I ask you, if you were him, wouldn’t you just let things lie?

  Dream the Crow’s Black Dream: A Tale of Vampires IV is the seventh fiction book I have had published.

  To readers of this story:-

  Thanks very much for purchasing Dream the Crow’s Black Dream. I hope you enjoy the story, and do let me know, as I love to hear from fellow readers.

  You can contact me here:-

  ●https://twitter.com/_JohnHennessy

  ●http://www.johnhennessybooks.blogspot.co.uk/

  ●http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6869934.John_Hennessy

  ●https://www.facebook.com/john.hennessy.94009

  Table of Contents

  Contents

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Looking for Solace

  Dark Legend

  May She Never Rest in Peace

  Broken Wing

  Tick Tock

  No Mercy or Compassion

  Til Death Us Do Part

  Out of Sight

  “Dreams are like angels, they keep bad at bay.

  Love is the light, scaring darkness away.”

  The Power of Love - Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

  Looking for Solace

  The gravestone read Daisy Oliver, our beautiful daughter.

  Her parents had deliberately omitted her age, along with the date she died, because even after a few years had passed, the wounds continued to run deep. She was at peace, and to her family, that was all that mattered.

  Seth McAndrew wasn’t the most devout of Catholics. In fact, it could be said that once he left the Roman Catholic school which both he and Daisy had attended, his relationship with God became more estranged than it was already.

  He was seventeen now. Two years earlier, when he had tried to convince Daisy to stay away from the priory, she had told him that she would, only to appear alongside Anna and Joel.

  “Surprise!” Daisy smiled with wicked glee at Seth’s shocked expression.

  To the gravestone, Seth spoke, because having a two –way conversation with Daisy was not going to ever happen again.

  “I told you to stay away Daisy,” said Seth, slowly and deliberately. “Why didn’t you listen? I tried to protect you, but you wouldn’t have understood. You wouldn’t have believed me if I had told you in advance. We could have had something special. Now we never will.”

  She answered back, not with words, but with her what the hell are you on about expression.

  He realised a figure was behind him. He should have felt a little embarrassed at speaking out loud, but found he was anything but embarrassed. Angry was the best way to describe it.

  “We’re uh…closing soon. You should go.”

  It was one of the cemetery attendants.

  “Fair enough mate,” said Seth. “I’ll be on my way.”

  “Special girl, was she?”

  “You could say that, yeah.”

  “You can always come back tomorrow if you like.”

  “I might just do that,” said Seth.

  That was an understatement. Seth had visited Daisy’s grave every day since the last retelling of The Blood and the Raven. The wicked one who had coerced Seth into finding groups of people to tell the tale to; had not been seen since Seth told her he would not do it again, and that threatening to kill him would not change his mind.

  The vampire concurred.

  But when the vampire told him that she would visit his parents and his grandparents that very same night, and kill them in the same vicious manner as those who had the bad luck to encounter her, he reneged.

  A further thirty-seven people died before one day, the vampire just disappeared.

  Seth prayed every day. Not necessarily to God, but to someone. Something. There had to be an entity that didn’t necessarily have
a white beard that would listen to his pleas. That’s what they were. He did not know how to pray. So he pleaded with whoever would listen that the vampire would leave him and the ones he cared about in peace.

  That night, his sleep was broken by visions of the cemetery, and a gravestone that was in a bad state of disrepair. The moss had grown over the gravestone, weeds decorated the burial area itself. No-one ever paid the last resting-place of this person a visit.

  Seth wondered why. Then a bird came to settle on top of the stone, and cawed repeatedly. Seth thought it was a raven at first, but he could make out a yellow beak.

  “A crow,” he murmured in his sleep. “A crow on top of that monster’s grave.”

  He woke up with a start as the shrill of his alarm went off. He was immediately annoyed with the alarm. It had only been doing its job, of course, but with a heavy fist he banged it into silence.

  “If I could have only made out the writing on the stone,” thought Seth.

  The next day, he did, as he always did, and took a detour into the cemetery. He would pay his respects to Daisy, but he wanted to find that strangely marked grave that had been invading his dreams.

  Amongst his hobbies, when he could focus on them, was art. He grabbed a pencil and sketched a few images from the dream. He chose to draw the stone first. It was a simple grey stone, the wording had been carved deep into it. He was unsure what the name was in full, but he could make out the third letter, which was an E, and the last letter, the composition of which had degraded a lot. Seth deduced it was either an M or an N.

  “Could be anybody,” said Seth out loud. Under his breath, he did not wish to say who it might just be.

  He drew the small details that he could remember from the broken images of the dream. The stone was in a bad state of repair. Maybe a bomb had hit the area during the Second World War. Or the First. The area around the stone seemed to have sunk a lot, but with few trees to protect it from heavy rain, maybe that was the only explanation.

  “Unless someone had tried to dig up whoever had once laid there. Or they could have climbed out of the grave themselves, because they weren’t actually dead.”

  He chastised himself, this time at an inaudible level.

  Stop it Seth. Focus, you idiot. Stick to the details. What else do you remember?

  Seth twirled the pencil in his hand from one finger to the next.

  A stone, grey in colour, a chunk broken off on its top right corner. The lettering engraved deeply. An E and possibly an M.

  Lots of moss.

  That was it. The stone was covered in it, that’s why the lettering was so hard to make out.

  Seth sighed and promised that he would return to it before he slept. So this time, when he visited the cemetery, he said a quick prayer at Daisy’s grave, before moving on. The light was poor, because it was late January. Even though the cemetery would close at 4pm, it would be falling dark more than an hour earlier.

  He looked around, but could not see anything like the stone in his dream. Just when he was about to give up, he was interrupted from his thoughts by the attendant from the previous day.

  “Afternoon squire,” said the attendant, who seemed far too young to be using a word like squire.

  “Hey,” was all that Seth could offer in reply.

  “I’m beginning to think you hang around here so much, half the people in here are in their graves because of you.”

  “Heh-heh,” laughed Seth nervously. “Yeah, I can see why you’d think that.”

  “The girl’s grave is over on that plot, beyond the chapel,” said the attendant. “But you’re not interested in her today, are you?”

  Seth did not like the line of questioning. But the attendant could be useful, so he decided to play him at him own game.

  “You seem to know a lot about the graves here and who is in them,” said Seth. “But I am looking for one particular grave. I don’t have much information on that, and when I tell you what information I do have, you probably won’t be able to help me.”

  He sighed, for added dramatic effect, and waited to see what the know-it-all attendant would do next.

  “Well squire, it’s my job to know such things. You give me a name, I can find it. Even part of a name. I know where everyone is, and where they’re supposed to be. Got to keep them in their place, you see.”

  Seth disregarded his last point, although he didn’t like what he was hearing. That said, this was a time to test the arrogant son of a bitch.

  “Emma Willis.” Seth hoped she was still alive, she was a cute blonde girl who wore her hair with a single braid running down her left shoulder.

  “Emma Willis, or Emma G. Willis?” replied the attendant, with a smug expression on his face. “We’ve got two. Emma One is in the plot to your left, five rows deep, third stone on the right. Emma Two is the first stone you would see if coming in via the cemetery’s most northern entrance. There is a bouquet of red carnations placed on her grave if you can’t find it.”

  What a creep this guy is, thought Seth. A creep he might be, but he was about to surprise Seth with what he said next.

  “But that’s not who you come for, is it? You come to see something else, didn’t you?”

  “Well-”

  “Ah, it’s alright squire,” said the attendant. “I’m Ricky, and I know all these places, every nook and cranny of the yard. By the way, that’s what we call the cemetery. Now, come on squire, who is it you’re looking for? A mass murderer – or someone killed by a mass murderer? People who died in mysterious circumstances, how about that. Or maybe you’re -”

  He paused, and it was far too long for Seth.

  “Or maybe I’m what?”

  “Well squire, you seem a nice enough guy, and I don’t want to you to take offence, but we sometimes get weirdos in here. Child molesters sometimes turn up here on the first day they are released from prison. You know the UK laws like I do. We’re a soft touch. Bring back hanging, I say. What do you think?”

  The more Seth talked to this Ricky, the more he disliked him. This little squirt was good at controlling the conversation. It was five minutes past three now. It was getting too dark, and Seth did not want to stay with this man a moment longer.

  “I’m not a politician. My majors were in art and media studies.”

  “But you’ve got to have an opinion, am I right squire? Tell me, and I will tell you where she is.”

  “Where who is?”

  “The one you’re really looking for.”

  “Alright,” said Seth. “I can tell you I won’t be voting for any political party, because who ever you vote for, the government gets in.”

  Ricky laughed like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. Or did his laugh sound strange, like a bird.

  “A crow! That was it,” exclaimed Seth, glad that in an indirect manner, Ricky had got him off politics and back on track. “There was a crow on the grave stone.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t a raven, squire?” Ricky smiled with a full beam, revealing that the majority of his teeth were black. Seth tried to hide his disgust, but was unsure if he had been entirely successful.

  “No, it was not a raven. Most definitely not.” Seth could hear how his words sounded, and he wanted to make the sentence sound a little less harsh. It was too late for that now. Seth could live his whole live and not see a raven ever again. So he added a sentence, and immediately wanted to take it back.

  “I think I’d know a raven if I saw one.”

  Ricky was quick to respond.

  “I bet you would squire. I bet you would.”

  Keeping a bright and chirpy manner in the cemetery was something Ricky was good at. He clapped his hands together and walked briskly ahead of Seth.

  “It’s right this way, squire.”

  Seth wanted to find the stone that was in his dreams, but was interested to see how this would play out. Maybe Ricky would point to a stone, then when Seth was looking at it, that’s when his skull would be bashed in, and
Ricky would laugh like a crow cawing, and say I told you knew where it was, Squire.

  After walking to an area of the cemetery where the grass was overgrown in parts, and up road that a car could perhaps travel up at one time, but was now non-existent and was a road in all but name, they found it.

  Seth could not believe his eyes. There must have been five thousand graves in the cemetery; he had given a few basic details about the stone to this Ricky, and confound the Devil, he had taken Seth straight to it.

  It was hard to make the lettering out. The two E’s were clear enough, along with an R. The stone was missing the upper right chunk, and it must have been the stone in the dream, but for one small detail.