A Coldness in the Blood Read online

  Joe had toyed with the idea of assigning some agent from his own office to bring him a report on the fire in Old Town, and any out-of-the-ordinary events that might have happened at around the same time. But he hesitated, unwilling to risk the life of anyone who would undertake the job without a clue to what they might be up against. Quickly he decided that he would feel better about it if he undertook that investigation himself.

  About an hour after leaving home, he was looking over the scene in Old Town.

  There had been no trouble locating the burned-out building. It was surrounded by broad tapes of yellow plastic carrying stern warnings of DO NOT CROSS.

  Originally it must have been a substantial and respectable house, or rather a typical small Chicago apartment building, undistinguished and rectangular, brick with a flat roof. Three stories high, it stood in the middle of a block, almost filling its narrow lot, half a block from the busy commercial thoroughfare, whose enterprises had spilled down this side street. Now, when Joe looked carefully, he could see that a part of the roof had indeed fallen in.

  Beside one flank of the building was the mouth of a darkish alley, with a middle-aged auto parked in it at an angle.

  Approaching the building, Joe stepped under the warning tape as if he had a perfect right to do so, thus practically guaranteeing that none of the passersby in the vicinity were going to pay him much attention.

  Joe observed in the mud of the alley, right beside a manhole, a strange track—smear was more like it—such as might be left by the dragging of a large object. The alley was poorly drained behind the burned-out building, and the place had been drenched with fire hoses. The track must have been made after the firemen had rolled their hoses up.

  The manhole cover was only a few feet in from the mouth of the alley, and the pavement immediately surrounding it was covered by a thin layer of drying mud. Marks in the mud suggested that the manhole cover had recently been displaced, pushed or dragged clear off its opening and then reclosed—but the closing had not quite been properly accomplished. Looking at the marks, Joe Keogh was eerily aware of the suggestion that something large, the size of a man or bigger, had come up from below, and then gone down again, seeking a wet refuge.

  Well, if anyone was going to search the sewers on this case, it wasn’t going to be Joe Keogh, or any of his employees. And any investigating he did was going to be done in daylight.

  Raising his eyes, he took note of the fact that across the street, where the backyards of modest houses came up to the alley, a middle-aged man in a white-strapped undershirt stood leaning over a fence, intently watching what Joe was about.

  Hands in pockets, Joe strolled in that direction. The man straightened up, but stayed right where he was. No doubt it was his own backyard.

  As soon as he got into easy conversational range, Joe asked: “See anything really strange on the day they had the fire?”

  “Just the usual stuff.” The man sounded third- or fourth-generation Chicago-Polish. “Fire trucks, all that shit. You wanna hear strange, though?”

  “Yeah, try me.”

  “Auto fix-it garage, two blocks over that way.” He pointed with a stubby finger. “Had a big watchdog, German shepherd. Later on that night, after the fire, something got in, through the barbed wire and all, and ate it. ’Bout half of it, anyway.”

  “Good lord. Ate a watchdog?”

  “’Bout half of it was gone. That’s what I heard.”

  “Anyone call the cops?” That would seem inevitable, unless the dog had been guarding something less legal than autos and tools.

  “You a cop?”

  “No. Insurance.” That was plausible, and, in a sense, was almost true.

  The man shrugged. “Didn’t call ’em. What good does it do? Crazy maniacs, running around—to do that to a dog.”

  After Joe went out in the afternoon, Kate managed to resist a certain impulse for almost twenty minutes. Then she gave in, and went to look in a certain upstairs drawer, where she found a certain spot quite empty. The shoulder holster had not been put away, which was not good news at all.

  Oh God, she prayed silently, let it not be starting all over again. Not the real bad stuff, you know what I mean, Lord. Then she went to her own desk and sat down, determined to find something useful to fill the time and occupy her mind.

  For the rest of Wednesday Andy played computer games, or sat around the house, leafing through books and magazines, sometimes staring at nothing. Once he came to his mother to ask her if they had any books on ancient Egypt.

  Kate stared at him. “Didn’t you do an on-line search?”

  “Yeah, sure—only there’s so much stuff.”

  She suggested he use the encyclopedia—which now, of course, was also to be found on the computer.

  Around midafternoon her son uncharacteristically fell asleep on the sofa, but in an hour was up again, going back to the home computer, playing a couple of violent games with what appeared to be his normal skill.

  On emerging slowly from his trance in the last minutes of Wednesday’s daylight, Maule felt well rested. More importantly, he had gained what he thought might prove valuable information; he now felt instinctively sure that the mysterious, mangled contents of the little white statue in his apartment had once been a mummified small crocodile. How this would eventually help him to come to grips with the murderer who had invaded his home remained to be seen; but the gain of knowledge was an important start.

  Maule’s eyes were open for some time before he was able to see clearly and regain full awareness of his surroundings. Even before his eyesight became fully focused, his attention was drawn to certain muffled, puzzling sounds, originating perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Searching his centuries of memory, he could not quite match them with anything that he had ever heard before.

  First was a great, belching, bubbling kind of splash, suggesting images of someone forcing an inverted bathtub under water and then breaking it apart, with the sounds of rending metal.

  His eyes, as well as his inner sense of duration, told him that hours had passed since he lay down. The time was shortly before sunset, and he knew that he was lying in the old house that had once been a transplanted castle, on a bluff above the Sauk River, in northern Illinois.

  For a brief time Maule remained motionless on his back, eyes dreamily following the golden beams of the sinking sun as their spots gradually crept upward along the stonework of an interior wall that sometimes still seemed to be made of medieval stone. His awareness persisted that he was not going to be alone for long, but the fact seemed to require no immediate action on his part.

  Instead it seemed more important, at the moment, to think back over an extension of his meaningful Egyptian dream, with variations.

  The sun was still not down when he rose lithely to his feet, then walked through the slanting beams where they entered his temporary bedchamber through a crevice in the wall.

  For the time being, he left his thin mattress of plastic and native earth stretched on the floor. His next step was to climb once more to the roof of the castle to retrieve his spear—as soon as he laid his hand on it, he could feel that substantial power of some kind had been added. Taking the weapon in his right hand, where it rested lightly as a feathered dart, he noted that the point looked even sharper than it had back in Chicago. He brought his left hand over, intending to test the keenness with a finger, but at the last instant some instinct warned him not to do so. He would have to thank a certain legendary wizard when they next met.

  Squinting occasionally in fading sunbeams, the vampire went out to see what he was going to get in the way of callers. Having taken certain other precautions of a more internal nature, he thought that this time he would be ready for an onslaught from any attacker, human or otherwise, who attempted to control his mind.

  The walls of the ambiguous structure in which Maule had enjoyed his dream seemed to have swelled up larger and thicker around him while he was entranced, almost as if they might be driv
en by some impulse to offer him protection.

  He was pleased to note the sudden appearance of a door, placed very conveniently for his current use, in a section of wall that had been entirely smooth and solid when he entered the house. The new door, of thick oak with brassy hinges, swung open for him automatically as he approached. A moment later Maule was outside.

  Now he knew he would not have long to wait to be confronted by a visitor, whoever or whatever it might be. Moving on with slow, deliberate strides, he passed close by a collapsed pit in the earth that not many years ago had been a modern swimming pool. A curved and rusted metal ladder still led down, burying itself pointlessly in mud or muddy water, as if it were a passage to some domain beneath the earth.

  Someday, perhaps. But that was not going to be Maule’s road this evening.

  Shadows now covered almost the entire nearby surface of the earth, and avoiding direct sunlight was no problem. The fiery disk was just skimming lush distant treetops, more than a mile to the northwest, behind the green bluffs that confined the winding river.

  Sometimes in the past it had pleased him to occupy his mind with trivia on the eve of battle. It amused Maule now to play another round of a mental game he had dallied with in the past. The game involved trying to decide how many sunsets he had ever seen, and into what categories, of clouds and skies and coloring, they could be divided. His most recent efforts at calculation had led to the conclusion that he must have witnessed that dramatic event some two hundred thousand times. He also supposed that no two of that number had been precisely alike.

  Just beyond the rank weeds in the abandoned yard, in the direction of the steep slope that led down to the river, a certain something that had been drifting upslope from below, at first no more than an airy bulge of rising mist, was taking on a solid form. Was this meant as a distraction, while some greater threat took shape behind him? Looking around carefully, Maule decided not.

  Maule saw it come drifting in mist-form up the hill from the riverbank. Had he not been watching intently for something of the kind, he might have missed it altogether. To Maule, the mere fact of shape-changing was routine. But in more than five hundred years of life, breathing and unbreathing, Vlad Drakulya had never seen the like of the shape that was now assuming a solid form in front of him.

  ~ 6 ~

  The figure as it took on solid form was dripping wet, as if it had truly emerged only moments ago from the river or the swamp.

  The first parts to assume a distinct structure were the feet, standing solidly on the ground, some ten yards in front of Maule. Of these there were only two, though of slightly more than human size, and looking more animal than human, tipped in the front with claws instead of human toes. Their coloring was a scaly, gangrenous green.

  Then the shape abruptly wavered, taking on momentarily the aspect of a photographic negative. It was as if the creature’s physical appearance might be only a projected image, created by some powerful radiant core at the center of its being.

  Distantly the howl of some farmer’s dog, a wolflike sound, came drifting to the vampire’s ears. It seemed normal and wholesome, and even close to human, compared to the thing before him.

  Maule continued to study the form, which had now completely materialized. Already he was certain that this was the invader of his apartment, Tamarack’s murderer. Even to Maule’s long and broad experience it was bizarre, outlandish, alien. This despite the fact that the shape was basically almost human, that of a man of indeterminate age, not especially tall. All his limbs were short and thick. Different branches of the breathing human race had widely varying standards of personal beauty, but this matched none that Maule had ever heard of. Broad shoulders and a flat chest suggested maleness. Scanty hair, mud-colored, lay plastered to the sides of a misshapen head. Dark-yellow eyes were almost grotesquely wide-spaced in a dark-skinned, thin-lipped face. The mouth and the beardless lower jaw protruded more than was proper for humanity, suggesting the face of the white statue in Maule’s Egyptian dream. Several of the stubby fingers bore gleaming rings, suggesting power, as did the short, thick claws projecting from his fingers, where ordinary humans grew thin nails.

  The ugly lips moved slowly, and understandable words came forth: “Try to run away, if you wish. I will find it easy enough to catch you.” The language was some bastard form of Latin that Maule could barely understand, spoken with an accent that not even he could place. The voice was rough, uneven, tones almost stuttering, as if perpetually on the verge of breaking into humorless laughter.

  If the thing was bothered at all by the invisible, residual glow of Merlin’s magic, still faintly favorable to Maule though now a generation old, it betrayed no discomfort.

  The calm assumption that he, Vlad Drakulya, must be struggling to keep from panicked flight, was a stinging insult. But the vampire chose not to let his feelings show just yet.

  Maule replied, in his own version of the same language: “If I choose to turn and leave, I will not run. So, if at that moment you have the good fortune to be still alive, you might indeed be able to catch me.” He paused momentarily before adding: “Even as you might catch a plague.”

  He might as well have been talking to the wind, for all the reaction he got from the monstrous creature before him. More evidence, Maule thought, that it was not human, despite its fluency in human speech. But whatever it was, it radiated a strange psychic power that set Maule on his guard, grimly determined to seek every possible advantage, so that when their deadly combat started, as he was sure it must, he could hope to survive.

  Despite the summer’s heat, his visitor’s whole body down to the knees was covered in some kind of long-sleeved garment, something between a bulky sweater and a monk’s habit, woven in an intricate pattern, with white, furlike tufts suggesting kingly ermine. Every time it opened its mouth to speak, Maule saw irregular teeth, more of them than he could quickly count, more than any human ought to have, and all sharply pointed in the way that might be expected of wild beasts and the aroused nosferatu.

  Now it made a gesture of kingly arrogance, the right arm extended toward Maule, stubby, claw-tipped forefinger pointing at him—then that hand and finger pointed down. A command, silent but unmistakable, to make obeisance.

  It pleased Maule to ignore it, as the beast had ignored what he had said to it. He stood leaning on his spear, its butt grounded in enchanted earth. He could feel a pleasant thrum of power, old Merlin’s power, in the shaft. He hoped it would endure till it was needed.

  If Maule’s irreverent attitude aroused some emotion in the thing before him, it gave no sign. It simply let its extended arm fall to its side, and spoke again.

  “You are the undead one who has been known as tse-pesh—but no more. I will change your name, when I have decided on a better one … soon you will become my slave, and will learn always to answer to your new name promptly … but what shall your new name be?” The speaker was obviously asking the question only of himself; he raised an ugly hand to his ugly chin, and stood there musing.

  Maule offered his visitor a slight, mocking bow. His answer came in hard-edged American English.

  “I, in turn, have thought of a few names for you. ‘Slimy reptile’ and ‘murderer’ are two which spring immediately to mind. Probably I shall use others as our talk proceeds. But let me offer you a choice. What name would you consider a most deadly insult?”

  The creature was unruffled, and switched to English too, without apparent difficulty. “I am Sobek,” it informed him absently, in its grating, coughing voice. And again there came that wavering in its appearance, a momentary reversal of light and dark, a startling, knife-sharp flash of red, leaving Maule with the feeling that he was looking at nothing more than a projected image.

  The thing was going on: “There in the city you gave shelter in your den to the one calling himself Tamarack. Yet when I punished him for disobedience I spared you, because I saw in you the possibility of usefulness. You are quite strong, for a human variant, and
also durable—I stunned you into dream-sleep, but here you are already moving about, when I had not thought your mind would yet be clear enough … did you understand what you were doing when you transported the portal here?”

  Maule smiled, considering his reply. “The portal” certainly sounded like a reference to a door, and he had left Joe Keogh’s false door, the strange little panel, inside Tamarack’s body bag.

  Less than a minute now, he thought, and the sun would be wholly behind those distant bluffs beyond the river. Maule had decided to retain man-form for the time being. He could feel how four of his teeth had involuntarily swollen and sharpened in this enemy’s presence. The wooden spear, its butt-end still resting on the ground, the lightning-tempered point aloft, felt comfortable in his right hand.

  He said: “I find this place restful and congenial, and came here because I thought it might afford me deep and soothing sleep, away from irritating, intrusive vermin like yourself. You were wise—prudent—to show such consideration, not to bother me while I was sleeping.”

  Still his words seemed only to go past their target, as if whatever he might say could not be worth the trouble of listening to. Now it mused: “On coming through the portal this time, I had thought to find myself again inside your dwelling-place.”

  The oddities of the thing’s appearance were altering even as Maule watched, startling him so that he almost lost the thread of what he was about to say. Now, swiftly shedding the semblance of a crocodile, morphing even as it spoke into a shape more convincingly human, that of an Egyptian-looking man, it told Maule: “It will be easy to control your mind again, should I decide to do so.”

  “That we shall see.”

  Ignoring his response, it looked around, and seemed to give a condescending sniff. “There is a fair amount of human magic here. Probably you came to this place seeking protection from one greater than yourself. That was a foolish hope. No human works of enchantment can save you from the displeasure of a god. Nor will you be able to resist my teaching.”