An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3) Page 16

  He righted the little table. Still, there was no way that the damage wouldn’t be noticed if anyone came into the bedroom. I was cleaning my gun this afternoon, officer, and it just…they must here that pretty often. But still the gun had nothing to do with Kate, or with her brother’s kidnapping. So that would be all right. What he had to do now was show the world that Kate Southerland was still alive. After that, there ought to be lawyers around sharp enough to demonstrate to the world that whatever had been happening to Kate lately was not Craig Walworth’s fault.

  But this time, when he got back to the cheerful kitchen, his chronic fear was realized. Kate was gone. No trace of her. And the back door was still locked and bolted from the inside.

  Partial relief came with the realization that she must have wandered off somewhere, and still be in the apartment. He found his front door still chained up, too, when his hopeful search for Kate took him that far. He stood in the living room and called her name a few times, tentatively. He was completely certain that that image of Carol, with a hole shot in her dress but not the pink skin of her belly, had been a picture projected out of his own doped mind. That had to be. Tonight’s Kate, though, had looked worn and almost sick, and despite that—or maybe because of it—she had been very real.

  Of course Carol, now that he thought about it, never looked all that real anyway. Beautiful, God yes, but…

  So he went through the whole place once more, calling Kate’s name softly, peering into closets as he went and even under the beds. Doing this made him feel no sillier than anything else he could think of doing.

  Once the gun in his belt pinched his belly when he bent over to look under a bed, and he had a sudden almost overpowering impulse to draw it out and put the muzzle to his head and pull the trigger. Would death be a drug-delusion too, an unreal sleep? Was Kate really dead and was he sharing the ultimate bad trip with her? When people got up for the morgue and walked…

  His doorchime sounded distantly. Someone at the front. The lobby desk should have called up—or had he missed hearing the intercom?

  This time he didn’t even bother looking through the viewer first. He just undid the fastenings of the door and opened up, ready to take whatever came.

  It was Kate again, standing there dumbly, looking just as she had before.

  “How do you do that?” Irritably he reached out and grabbed her by the solid, real jacket sleeve and pulled her into the apartment. “Now stay put, will you, and let me think? I got a head full of shit and I got to try to think. Baby, I’ve got to be sure you’re real before I call the cops to try to show you off.”

  “He’s coming after me,” said Kate, in her dazed voice that assigned nothing any gradation of importance.

  “He? Who?”

  “I went downstairs just now, and there he was, coming along the walk. He wants me to go back with him. Give me orders, put me out of the way somewhere, that’s what he wants. But I’ve got to keep looking for Joe—”

  Reality was suddenly as unmistakable as an onrushing truck. “Winter’s coming? Up here?”

  “—and he won’t let me go on looking.”

  It was quiet enough now that Walworth could hear one of the front elevators running.

  He ought to show the world one Enoch Winter, dead, along with one Kate Southerland alive. Winter had forced his way in, trying to attack her. Tell that story, and then let the good lawyers guide him through.

  Quickly he closed his front door again, leaving it unlocked. His last look out into the lobby showed him the mirror with its draping raincoat. Show business, he thought.

  Waving Kate to stand back, he retreated just a few steps from the door and drew the gun and thumbed the hammer back very silently. He raised it in a two-handed aim, keeping his gaze squarely on the door.

  “What are you doing?” Kate’s voice was suddenly changed radically toward the normal, as if the sight of the drawn gun had acted as a tonic shock. “Craig!”

  The doorbell chimed. Somehow, with the distraction from Kate he had missed hearing the sounds of the elevator stopping and opening.

  “Who?” he called out sharply. His hands, center-aiming at the door, were very steady.

  “Winter,” the deep voice answered.

  “No,” Kate whispered, somewhere behind him. “It isn’t. Be careful, don’t shoot.”

  “Come in,” Walworth called, his trigger finger very slowly taking up slack. “It’s unlocked.”

  The knob turned and the door swung in. Not Winter at all. Almost as tall, but lean. Under an open black topcoat, what looked like a new suit of expensive black. A somehow Christmasy red tie, a fine white shirt. Smiling, jaunty, vigorous, but obviously old.

  The old man.

  I see now that you would only laugh like an idiot if I tried to tell you his real name.

  Walworth fired. Even though he knew, before the gun went off, exactly how much good the bullet was going to do him.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Kate saw the old man step in the front door, and in the same instant she heard the pistol fire. Only with that shock did her mind grow fully clear. If the old man had really needed help, she would have been too late to help him. As it was, she sprang forward with a speed and strength that she had not known she possessed, reaching past Craig’s shoulder to knock down his joined hands with the weapon still clasped in them. The fore of the movement knocked Craig to his knees.

  The old man smiling reassuringly at Kate. Then, calmly bending with his own fluid and unhurried speed, he caught Craig by the shirt front and lifted him erect again, letting the gun stay somewhere on the floor. Reaching back with his free hand, Corday pushed the door shut behind him. Then he gently questioned both of the people with him: “Where is Joe?”

  “He’s been here,” said Kate. “He’s not here now.”

  Craig said: “I’m not gonna take any heat to protect her. Go over to Enchantress Cosmetics. Ask for Carol.”

  “And what does Carol look like?” The question was in a tone of mild interest. Walworth’s strong, young body was swaying, and he seemed to be trying without success to avoid the old man’s eyes. The old man seemed to be keeping the young one propped up with one finger.

  “Real good shape,” Walworth muttered. “Sharp dresser. Young. Red hair—”

  “Ah? And where is the place you mentioned?”

  Walworth named an intersection. “About eight blocks from here, west and south. I gotta warn you about her. She’s really got it in for you.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And for me too,” Walworth added hastily. “She wants me dead. Just today she drugged me—bad, man, bad. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. I thought you were a friend of hers just now, coming to finish me off. That’s why I…”

  “Kate has told me,” the old man softly interrupted, “how and where she came to meet them. Johnny has spoken to me of a bearded man driving a car, who asked him for directions.”

  Walworth’s hands that had aimed the gun so steadily were shaking now. He couldn’t seem to find anything to say.

  Kate could only think of one thing clearly. “Please,” she broke in, talking to the old man. “I can help you now. I’m all right. Let’s go find Joe. He’s in real trouble.”

  Still holding Walworth almost tenderly with one thin hand, the old man turned thoughtful eyes to Kate. “Go to the location this man has just given us,” he ordered. “I shall follow presently.” When Kate hesitated, he repeated firmly: “Go.”

  Kate nodded, turned, and fled toward the kitchen. There was no sound of the back door being opened, but Walworth knew that she was gone.

  He asked: “You gonna call in the cops on me?”

  “No,” the old man assured him gently.

  “You’re not really here anyway, are you?” Walworth asked him, shivering. “I could almost wish you were.”

  * * * * * * *

  At the mausoleum the old man had shown Kate something of how to use her recently acquired powers. How the night
change in her body would enable her to pass like smoke through locked and bolted doors. The kitchen door went past her like some vague and insubstantial curtain, but this time she had hardly thought about the process. As she started down the back stairs of the apartment building, all her mental energies were concentrated on the job of finding Joe.

  The back stairs were concrete and steel, designed as an interior fire escape as well as a service passage. Not until Kate had descended past two landing did she come to a small window. At once she used her marvelous new agility to leap up upon its narrow inside sill. Once she had located the knife-edge crevice where reinforced glass met metal frame, the closed window was no obstacle to her passage.

  In the passing she willed an alteration in the cells of her body, the fabric of her clothes, the very air that filled her lungs and all the spaces in her bones. Outside, her altered body was at one with the wind. Her altered senses blurred. A creature of the air now, and no more solid than the air, she sank through clouds of falling snowflakes. Like blowing snow she skimmed above rooftops, down and up and down again.

  Propelling herself by her will, she moved south, and west.

  Joe was near.

  His danger was terrible, but at least the threat did not seem to be immediate. And fortunately he had not yet been greatly hurt. Kate’s inner senses were keener now than before, but at the same time sight and hearing had grown blurred and dull and indirect with her physical body dispersed to hardly more than mist. She felt rather than saw the glowing streetlights and the bulking buildings of the city below, and anything dimmer or smaller could hardly be perceived at all. In order to reach Joe she was going to have to take on solid form again.

  In theory, she knew, the forms of animals were available now for her to put on. But she had as yet tried nothing like that, and at the moment she had no mental energy or time to spare for experimentation. So when she came down with a crunch in rooftop snow, her shape was her own, as human as before. And as her senses grew keen again Kate was at once aware not only of the details of the buildings and the storm around her, but of two other forms that were passing as she had just passed in the air. They were the diffuse bodies of a man and a woman that Kate was almost sure she had never seen before.

  Joe was very near now, but not in the building where Kate had come down. She moved to crouch motionless beside a chimney, while the couple she had just detected materialized in a slow descent out of the beflaked air to another roof only half a block away. The building they came down on was no more than two or three stories high, of concrete gray.

  * * * * * * *

  In the little storeroom there were a couple of fifty-five-gallon steel drums, with clamped-on lids. There were wooden crates and cardboard boxes. It was too dark to see how any of them were labeled. Joe thought that if he could get to his feet he could make an effort to spill one or more of these containers on the chance that they might hold something helpful. A box of knives would seem to be unlikely. Maybe glass to break, to try to get an edge with which to cut his bonds—if he could move his hands enough to pick up anything. Something to start a fire with, to attract help? He hadn’t yet reached the stage where burning himself to death looked like a desirable option.

  But it didn’t take long to convince himself that trying to work free of the ropes without some kind of tool was going to be futile. Maybe if they left him here two days unwatched he’d manage it. But by then he would have died of hypothermia, or whatever they called it now. The storeroom wasn’t as cold as the outdoors tonight, but even with his jacket still on he was no longer warm.

  The ropes were fixed so he couldn’t stand. He might be able to spill boxes, though. If one of them contained glass, and if the glass broke, that might help—more likely, though they would just be irritated by his noises and come in and twist one of his fingers off.

  There was one box on the floor, about as high as a piano bench and as long as a piano, whose lid was slightly askew, so that it ought to be possible to see or maybe reach inside. A place to start, something to try. Crabbing his way along the cold concrete as best he could, almost silently, Joe got beside the large crate. Here his face was in reflected streetlight, while the interior of the box remained in heavy shadow; looking in, he could distinguish only vaguely mounded white, about halfway down.

  He had to find something to cut his ropes with, the way people were always doing it in the stories. Anything.

  At one end, the whitish surface inside the box was marked with a dark ring a couple of inches across. Just above that were two glassy spots…

  He froze, even the cold-trembling in his limbs suspended for the moment, and in that moment he was afraid that he was going to faint. A dead woman lay there, her staring eyes hardly a foot beneath his own. A young woman dressed in white.

  Jesus. Jesus. His back against another crate, Joe slid away from his discovery, trying to keep from blacking out. His arms and legs were throbbing, and at the same time trying to go numb. If he fainted now…they hadn’t even taken away his gun…

  …there were two voices again, somewhere out in the apartment. Joe understood that he was coming out of some kind of blackout. Probably a brief one, for he hadn’t frozen yet, or wet his pants either. Something else to think about…

  A Chicago cop shouldn’t pass out at the sight of one more dead woman. It made his enemies no worse than before, he’d known what they were like ever since Kate’s body had been found…

  Oh, God.

  But it wasn’t Kate. Blondish hair, perhaps, but—

  In a moment Joe had pushed himself back in position to peer again into the crate, or coffin. Of course it wasn’t her, he would have known at first glance if it had been. He forced himself to gaze into the box, trying to make out details that he had earlier avoided. It wasn’t Kate, even allowing for death’s changes. This woman was smaller, sharper featured. And something was wrong about her mouth.

  Out in the apartment, the two people talking had moved closer to the storeroom door. “You simply left him there,” Carol was saying now. Whoever had been left where, she wasn’t sure whether she liked the idea of it or not.

  “He woulda died,” answered the rough voice of Leroy Poach, who had been hanged in Oklahoma in 1934. “No way he would’ve lasted if I’d tried to bring him here. As it is he’s probably finished by now. I think I got him right through one lung. You shoulda seen the blood.”

  “Oh, I’d love to fly out there now…if I thought I could be there for the end.” Carol’s voice suddenly became a whisper of concentrated hate. “So much effort, so much time. Even you can’t begin to realize …and now, to miss the end at last.”

  “Take off, then. Enjoy. I’ll talk to the people till you get back. Explain to Lady Wanda when she gets up.”

  “No.” Carol was regretfully decisive. “This conference is too important. I must be here for all of it, if I can. I must be unhurried, in control of everything. There must be no doubt in any of their minds that I am now in control. That the future is going to be what I say…Poach, what about the Southerland family?”

  “They were all out somewhere, except the old woman. I put her out. It don’t look to me like any of the others will get home tonight, the way it’s snowing. If they do, well, they’ll move the old bastard one way or the other, and that’ll be it. Cops’ll buzz around for a while, but the body’ll be gone to nothing before they get a good look at it.”

  “Tell me again about the fight. I want to hear it all.”

  “Well. I looked in all the closets and everywhere as I went through the house, see? Then I got to this room in back, and I knew right away. There it was, a big stone coffin like the one I found out in the cemetery.”

  “It must have been earthenware of some kind, to provide the home earth. Clever. We must remember that for future use ourselves. Go on.”

  “Anyway, I just knocked it over and he rolled out on the floor. I got the stake in before he even got his eyes open. That opened his eyes for him! He managed to stand up, an
d we thrashed around a lot, but it wasn’t really a fight. He didn’t have a chance—right through the chest. Nailed ’im there like a bug.”

  When Carol spoke again her voice was low. “I suppose it was for the best.”

  “Suppose?” Poach’s voice did not really show anger; rather it was as if he would have shown anger if he dared. “In the two years since I met you, you been drummin’ it into me, how I gotta kill him quick if I ever get the chance. How dangerous he is. Also how much you hate him. So I thought it worked out just perfect. I got ’im but I didn’t finish ’im. I give you the chance.”

  “Yes, you did the right thing. You have done very well.”

  “You don’t act too happy.”

  “Ah, dear Poach, don’t sulk. It is just—can you imagine what it is like, to hate someone for four hundred years? You cannot, you are not yet a century old. After such a length of time, there is something like love in it.”

  “Love?” The tone was crude, incredulous. What had been near anger was near-laughter now.

  Carol’s voice lashed at him. “Remember your place, my man. What you were when I found you. What you are and will be still depends on me.”

  Poach mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “Yes, my lady. I didn’t mean…”

  “See that you don’t.”

  The door to the storeroom opened without warning, and Carol was looking in at him. She was wearing a kind of green jumpsuit now, a fancy party coverall, and she smiled at Joe enchantingly. Then her eyes moved beyond him, just as a faint noise came from that direction.