Chapter Two: De Profundis

Spike and Drusilla were nearly upon the girl – like two wolves, flanking her on either side, hoping to catch her unawares – but just as they were nearly upon her she turned around and gave them a hard look.

"Spike. Drusilla. I should have known." Buffy's hand had already moved halfway into her satchel, her fingers closing upon the wooden stake securely hidden between her American history textbook and her hairbrush. Seeing the familiar faces of the two vampires in front of her, however, her stance instantly relaxed from aggression to impatience. "What's wrong, Spike? Just can't get any satisfaction out of life without my knocking you up a bit every now and then?"

"Oh, that hurts," Spike returned with a half smile that barely hid the glimmering of hatred and fascination that rose in his eyes every time the Slayer crossed into their sights. "And what would a pretty little tart like you be doing out here all by herself, as it were, without so much as an escort like Angie boy to watch her pretty little back, hmm? Or was it that you were hoping to meet me up some dark and lonely alley, perhaps?"

Buffy replied by yanking her stake out of her satchel and striding towards him, her face expressionless save for her lips which were pressed together with an implacable severity that appeared odd upon that otherwise young face. Spike instantly side-stepped back, Drusilla clinging nervously to his arm, and called out with a wary laugh, "Now, now, let's not get all high and righteous, Summers. You started this little lover's quarrel of ours, or don't you remember?"

Buffy sighed heavily, expelling air in one long, exasperated breath. "Okay, Spike. Mind telling me what you and Morticia are up to down here besides breathing down my neck and wasting my time?"

"We were listening to the house," Drusilla put in, her eyes wide.

"What?"

"Drusilla's tired," Spike butted in. "It is past both your bedtimes."

Buffy pointedly ignored him. "What sounds did you hear?"

Drusilla shook her head and put her finger to her lips.

"Is there any special sound that you're looking for, Slayer? Or is any fugitive sound that's good enough for you?" Spike enquired, aping the look of a concerned citizen.

"The local gossip in the underground dives is that a group of rogue vamps from Scotland arrived here in Sunnydale a week ago," Buffy replied. "I'd like to take them out as soon as I can get an idea of what they're up to and where they're hiding."

"How many of these fellows are there?" Spike asked with a frown.

"Three, not counting some human servant of there's," she replied. "Have you seen them?"

"No," Spike replied. "But if I do, I'll be sure to give them your address and tell the laddies to turn themselves in good and proper."

He then winked and turned away, Drusilla leaning upon his arm. Buffy was just pulling her stake out for the second time that night when she caught sight of something that not only stayed her hand but froze Spike in place as well.

A group of three vampires were running down the alley towards them, their coats flying behind them and their leader – a thin, gangly vamp with a briefcase clutched in his right hand – calling out orders in a voice ragged with exhaustion and coloured with an unmistakably Scottish brogue:

"Joseph will find us – decide later where to go – "

That was all Buffy caught as they rushed past. Then, they were gone, still running headlong down the alley as though less interested in where they were going than in what they were escaping. Instinctively, Buffy began to give chase and the vamps, hearing the sounds of pursuit stopped dead in their tracks. Their leader turned and caught sight of her then, his face twisting into a look of wry surprise and amusement. Then he signalled his two compatriots and, without a word, they diminished in size and disappeared like three flames that shrink and are snuffed when deprived of air. But out of the darkness into which they had seemingly vanished, Buffy saw the shapes of three black crows take flight and soar up above the leaning rooftops of the tenements before disappearing altogether from sight. The briefcase that their leader had been carrying was gone as well.

Buffy took a deep breath, her heart still pounding from the rush of adrenaline that had coursed through her veins during the chase. "Okay," she said. "I've never seen a vamp do that before, let alone three of them all at the same time."

Spike, however, remained nonplussed.

"You said they were from Scotland, didn't you?"

"I think, Spike," Buffy replied. "That now would be a good time for you and Drusilla to tell me about this house that the two of you were listening to."

In the space of ten minutes they were standing in front of the house that McCullough and his friends had so recently abandoned.

"So this is the place you saw them hanging out in?"

Spike nodded. "And before you get too pleased with yourself, Slayer, let me remind you that part of your bargaining for this precious information of mine involved your keeping me and Dru out of the range of your pointy little stick."

"For the time being," Buffy returned. "But I don't see how this information of yours gets me any closer to finding – "

She broke off abruptly, certain that she had heard something coming from the inside of the house. Perhaps she was hearing things – but, no, there it was again: that faint, soft sighing that could have been the wind but wasn't. Buffy was sure it was the sound of someone crying.

"I'm going in there," she said decidedly.

"You can't do that," Spike said, pointing to the sign nailed on the gate in front of the house's driveway. "'Trespassers will be prosecuted.' I think that applies to Slayers as well."

"Well, go ahead and prosecute me, then," Buffy said as she climbed over the gate. "Once you've talked the city council into holding trial during the midnight hours. I don't think you'll be able to stand in the witness box otherwise."

A breeze passed her as she approached the porch of the house, chilling the flesh at the back of her neck where a trickle of perspiration ran. The place looked as though it had been abandoned for years; broken statues, some with the carven wings of angels, others with the upraised hands of a Mary or a St. Francis. Neglect had put its hand even upon these beautiful relics, however, with an ivy vine tracing its way across a saint's veil and a crocus rearing its flowered head above the headless remains of an archangel.

Once inside the house, Buffy looked around swiftly, trying both to gain her bearings and discern in what direction the sound she had overheard had come from. The creak of a floorboard somewhere above her head and a muffled sob convinced her that her destination was upstairs. As she made her way up the steep staircase, she took in the paintings that hung at various intervals along the wall. Most were pleasant, rather innocuous watercolor landscapes done in the style of the Hudson valley artists. A few, however, depicted human subjects and the frozen dramas that these portraits conveyed were hardly innocuous. The artist who had executed them appeared to have possessed all the lascivious imagination of a Beardsley but with an added hint of morbidity and perversion in the contours of his subjects that leant a darkness to their lust that might have shocked even a Baudelaire or a de Sade. With a shudder, Buffy avoided meeting the eyes of the pale faces upon the canvasses, though to her annoyance she found that the number of such paintings seemed to increase as she ascended into the more neglected upper floors of the house.

The slight creak of a door from somewhere up above caused her to raise her gaze and catch sight of the attic door one floor further up. It was hanging half ajar, its hinges creaking rhythmically like footsteps upon an unstable floor. Buffy raced up the stairs, fighting down the rising terror that was beginning to well up like a tide of black bile within her heart. The house, she realised with a sort of embarrassed surprise, had affected her more deeply than she had expected. Was this why those three otherwise hardened vamps had fled it? She half smiled at the thought. Your taste in décor must be pretty grisly if even vamps can't stand it.

Her smile fled when she caught sight of what it was that sat in the middle of the attic.

He heard her enter the room, felt her light steps upon the floorboards as though they were the rough thundering of hooves, but he could do no more than lie there and listen: listen to them as they walked above him and as slowly – ever so slowly – the sound of them began to fade away as the world about him flickered and dimmed, replaced with an ever-rotating coil of darkness that took him within itself like a lover, burying him deeper beneath its suffocating heat so that the pain set him alive once more. He could see that the girl who stood above him could not see him, nor could she hear his tortured panting anymore than she might catch the faint scrabbling of an insect's legs beneath a floorboard. It was with a great effort that he half rose out of the darkness – parted his fretted, bloody lips – and called out in a scream that he knew must have sounded only like a whisper in that other world:

"Come back…in God's name, please…please don't leave me here…"

Then it all went black and he was falling: falling back into that darkness from whence he had risen, if only for a moment.

There, he knew from experience, his every tear, every sigh and plea would be heard and noted well.

Buffy's first reaction of shock gave way to pity when she saw that the child was still alive, though weak and pale from loss of blood. Gathering the little girl up in her arms, she was about to hurry out of the attic but stopped at the door as though physically arrested by some power even stronger than her own. Something like the faintest stirring of wind, the faintest breath of an infant's sob, filled that room – but only for a moment. Then it was gone and Buffy, with a shrug, turned and departed, leaving that forgotten chamber to moulder in dust and darkness alone once more.