The Watchtower

said, a ghastly smile on his face. Then, pointing his crooked and yellowed nail out the window: “He is coming!”
    “ What is coming? The creature that will make me immortal? It’s coming from the sea? What exactly is it?” Will asked the questions in quick succession while backing away from the window, realizing only now that he should have asked these questions sooner. But it was too late. Dee was right. It was coming. Something was swimming through the water at an impossible rate, heading straight toward the tower.
    Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Dee chuckling at him. Dee pushed himself back from his desk, leaned against the wall in his chair, and laughed even more enthusiastically when he saw how tormented Will was. His jovial relaxation said to Will, You’re mine, now. All mine. Will suddenly knew that he had made a terrible mistake. He had to get out of here before the monster Dee had summoned reached the tower. He sprang for the door … and found his way blocked by the tall, cowled friar who had opened the abbey door for him before. A flash of lightning lit his face, and Will gasped in horror. It was Charles Roget—Lightning Hands himself!
    “You! You scoundrel!” Will cried, backing away. “You followed me here!”
    In answer Roget lifted his hands, rubbed his fingertips together, and flung a ball of lightning at Will. The missile hit Will square in the chest and sent him flying across the room, crashing into the wall. He slid to the floor and lay stunned, staring up at Dee and Roget.
    “Why should I follow you here when this is my abbey? My dear friend Sir John Dee and I have been waiting for you. Waiting for you and for our honored guest.”
    Roget pointed at the window above Will’s head. Looking up, Will saw that the honored guest had arrived.
    The creature appeared to be an amalgamation of all the nightmares of the deep. Needle fangs curved down several inches below his chin, dripping with blood, perhaps from gulls encountered crossing the beach and going up the tower walls. His crimson-irised eyes seemed hot with hate, and their flame-pupils seemed drawn toward Will’s tender lips. This monster coming through the window had the beak of a squid, the scales of a sea serpent, and thousands of trailing locks that were actually, on closer scrutiny, writhing eels festering on its head. Each of the eels had sharp, tiny fangs that seemed to incline toward Will as fermenting stench might be drawn toward perfume.
    At the points of the thing’s ears, red snake heads had teeth.
    The thing was on him, its webbed hands closing around Will’s throat. Its stocky body weighed enough that the impact when it landed on Will was crushing, nearly asphyxiating him as it almost merged him into the wooden floor. Before he could blink, the venomous fangs were in arteries in his neck, drawing blood out and replacing it with supernatural filth, sending shivers of excruciating pain down through his capillaries and nerve endings. Gasping, Will survived near suffocation, but then he nearly blacked out with revulsion at the thing’s closeness, and his realization that fangs were in him.
    He saved consciousness only with a steely determination to kill the swimmer. As to the vilest of blood exchanges, Will had no idea how long it went on, for time seemed both compressed and yet somehow elongated in this hell cell of a room. He could definitely sense that the new blood was ugly and stained. As the writhing eels began to chew at his face, he grew even more enraged. The swimmer was trying to mutilate his features in a way that would match them up with his obscene blood and might also make him hate himself the way the swimmer hated him. Worse, Will saw that the swimmer’s features were becoming more human as he fed—not only more human, but more like Will’s own features! The swimmer was trying to steal his beauty from him along with his humanity!
    With this realization, Will suddenly found within himself a vast new strength, one he worried had something to do with the diabolical assault on him, but one he was going to make use of regardless. If it was too late to save his soul, it wasn’t too late to save his appearance. Which, he realized, he might be living with for a long time now. Forever.
    Will thrust the half-human, half-reptile vampire upward as if it were made of papier-mâché, red-ribboned saliva dripping from its mouth onto his face as he did so. He gripped it by torso and neck in his newly