Fatal Bargain (11 page)

“Randy is safe?” repeated Zach.

“He is safe,” agreed the vampire.

Zach, Sherree, Bobby, and Roxanne studied Randy in his new role as the safe one, the one who would go free, the one who would definitely get home tonight. They felt a strange rage at Randy, because he was no longer part of the group; he had been removed to another zone.

“The field,” said the vampire, “is narrowed. There are now five remaining choices for me. Five,” he repeated greedily. “Five. Five. Five. Five.”

Lacey’s shudder was deep in her gut, but she knew that the vampire was aware of it, and enjoying it, and hoping there would be more.

Only Sherree moved logically to the next point. “Heck,” said Sherree, “then I volunteer, too.”

“Thank you, my dear,” said the vampire. His eyes softened with dreamy pleasure and his largest teeth slid over his damp lips and hooked at the bottom of his chin. “You may all go now. Except Sherree, of course. Most thoughtful of you to resolve the situation, Sherree.” The tongue that licked his lips was pointed like a red ribbon. He moved far more swiftly to Sherree than he had toward Lacey.

“Wait!” screamed Lacey, grabbing Sherree’s arm and yanking her back. “This isn’t fair! You keep changing the rules.”

“I am not changing the rules at all,” said the vampire. His breath came in spurts, like whiffs of swamp gas. “You just don’t know them. I can’t help it that you are not acquainted with the workings of my world. I have certainly taken the time to become acquainted with
your
world.”

The vampire’s cloak encircled Sherree’s arm. It began to haul her in, as if she were clothes on an old-fashioned clothesline, being reeled onto the back porch. From beneath the folds of his horrible wrappings came his fingernails, like crushed foil, and then his hands, longer than human hands, bonier than human hands, stronger than human hands.

Sherree screamed in horror. The vampire was ecstatic. Screams were his appetizers.

“Wait!” said Lacey. She had one of Sherree’s arms and the cloak had the other. “Wait. I have to think.”

“You may think outdoors,” said the vampire. “It’s time for the five of you to go.”

“No!” shouted Lacey. “You said to start with that
we
had to choose your victim. Well, we didn’t! You broke the rules. This does not count.”

“Sherree volunteered for selfish purposes. I accepted. It’s not frequent for a victim to request being taken, but it is not unknown in history,” said the vampire, “and I am content with it.”

Sherree broke free both from the vampire’s cloak and from Lacey. She ran in circles around the diminishing tower. There were no exits. Once again, the vampire possessed the door. Ripping mindlessly at the remaining shutters blocking the tower windows, Sherree tried to find a way out of her fate. Her strength far surpassed even Bobby’s, fueled by adrenaline from her deathly fear.

Gradually, her frenzy diminished.

Gradually, her crazed attempts ceased.

And yet the vampire did not approach her. His head was cocked as if he had ears hidden beneath his horrid oily hair, as if he were listening to something.

They all listened.

Somewhere in the house, somebody was laughing.

The policewoman was bored.

Night duty was often boring.

She did not actually want anything to happen, and yet if she were to stay awake, something had to happen. She drank from the take-out paper cup of coffee. It was chilly now. Pretty awful stuff. But she had nothing else to do, so she sipped again.

The policewoman was quite young. She had graduated from the local high school not so long ago herself.

One-handed, she drove through the dark and quiet town. There used to be a lot more action on this side of the city, but since so many acres had been cleared for the future shopping mall, there was not much here. She paused at an intersection and considered driving past the old boarded-up mansion.

When the policewoman had been in high school, she had been a cheerleader, and had briefly known the girl who lived in that mansion. There had been parties there. Parties at which everybody seemed to know more than they let on. Parties from which people seemed to come and go as if they could move through walls. And then the girl herself had gone, as quickly and quietly as if she, too, had been walled up.

When the house was abandoned, nobody had ever gone there.

It was odd.

You would think — certainly the police force expected — that the teenagers of the town would see this as an ideal hangout.

But nobody had tried spending the night in its abandoned rooms. Nobody had spun doughnuts in its pathetic old gardens, and nobody had spray-painted initials in red paint on its sagging roof.

The policewoman had had a tumultuous high school career herself. There was not much she had not done, or tried, or at least watched. It was one reason she went into law enforcement: She was pretty familiar with the mood or the need that made a person break the law. She was stern now, but she understood.

There was no traffic. Really, it was remarkable. And on a weekend! Where were all the partying teenagers? The drunks who should be plastered by this time? The moviegoers who should be headed home after the late show?

The police car edged forward, as only police cars can, taking its eternal time, because nobody can argue.

But there were no other cars in sight that would mind the delay.

Setting the awful coffee in the cup holder, she approached the intersection of the valley road and the main downtown avenue.

The bright red taillights of a single car crept down the valley road and vanished.

The policewoman wondered whose driveway could possibly be down there. For a moment she waited to see if the taillights would reappear, as a very lost driver backed out of a very unpromising drive.

But none appeared.

Truly, the night was dead.

In lieu of any other action, the policewoman decided to go to the drive-in window of Dunkin’ Donuts. A jelly doughnut, she pondered, or a glazed cruller?

The police car turned the opposite direction from the twisted tower. The policewoman was not looking in her rearview mirror to see what was happening there.

But it would not have mattered if she had looked.

For vampires do not have reflections.

Sherree was swinging on one of the shutters, as if to hurl herself through the window, through the night, and come to a safe landing miles away.

The laugh shivered through the cracks in the plaster and came up through the cracks in the floorboards. It lay in the attic and it slid off the roof and it collapsed in the basement.

The laugh wrapped them like a gift box.

Except that the laugh was evil.

“Do vampires laugh?” said Zach. Zach did not sound as if he would ever laugh again.

“Vampires laugh,” said the vampire, “when they have a victim in sight. Other than that, it is quite rare.”

The shutters clattered.

All their little wooden slats clapped.

Sherree slid down from the shutter to which she had clung and fell in a heap on the floor. A second vampire entered the tower.

T
WO VAMPIRES
, THOUGHT LACEY.

It was beyond thinking about. She seemed to have no mind left. She could draw no conclusions and take no action. She could only stare.

The first vampire — Lacey could not stop herself from thinking of him as
their
vampire — was so much more cloak than this new one. This new one was gelatinous, sticky and dark like molasses dripping on a floor.

Once when Lacey was quite small, she and her father had been working in the garden, only to push the sharp edge of a shovel right down into a ground wasps’ nest. There had been a very brief moment in which wasps had zoomed out of their hole, circled once, and then attacked Lacey and her father. Lacey had not even known what a wasp was, but she knew enough to run.

Her father scooped her up as he fled, and they flew like rockets to the back door, slamming it against the buzzing horrors that followed them. Between them, Lacey and her father got eleven wasp stings.

We’ve found a vampires’ nest, thought Lacey. We pushed the sharp edge of the shovel down into the ground where vampires live.

What had really happened to the families who had lived in this house? Had they actually moved away? Or had something truly terrible happened to them? Had they hung wallpaper on a wall, only to learn who lived behind it? Had they dusted a shutter only to find the dark ooze of evil coming off on their innocent hands?

Tear it down! thought Lacey. Tear this house down! This house must be ended. Once the house is gone, these vampires must surely also be gone.

Facing two vampires was infinitely more terrifying than facing one.

Their vampire stood by the door he possessed. The new vampire blocked the shutters. Beyond him, since Sherree had yanked open all the shutters, the night sky was exposed. It was black. Nothing hung there, not a star, not a distant plane. Only blackness.

The vampire had told the truth. Inside this house, night would last as long as he needed it to.

Perhaps the house would never be torn down; perhaps the vampire could even control time, and the time to build the shopping mall would never come, and the time for rescue, and the time to go home — these would never come, either.

Zach and Roxanne kept swiveling their heads. They seemed to think as long as they kept an eye on each vampire, nothing could happen.

The vampire who had emerged from the shutters eventually stopped laughing. The laughter had poured out of him like water from a faucet, and Lacey had wanted just to turn him off, like a faucet, and be done listening to his noise.

Sherree, whose flesh the new vampire had brushed, kept making faces and gagging and crying, “
Eeeeeuuuuuuhhhh
!”

Bobby stared out the window, as if expecting somebody else to come in, some shape or horror not yet envisioned.

Only Randy seemed untouched by the new circumstance. He, after all, could not be prey. The rest were now, as the vampire had said early in the evening, simply small animals about to be taken by larger ones. But Randy was out of the running.

The vampires did not seem to be friends. Perhaps vampires did not have friends. And although they had long resided in the same house, one living between the floors, and the other living between the shutters, it seemed that they had not met in many years. Their schedules, it seemed, and their need for nourishment, did not coincide.

For the second vampire was starving. He had been closed up, he said, for a long, long time.

Zach said, “You’re the one who peeled my fingers off the sill, aren’t you?”

The vampire was pleased to be recognized.

“Eeeeuuuhh, he touched you, too?” said Sherree. “Eeeeuuuhh, this is so sick.”

Roxanne suddenly giggled. Sherree kept adding touches of human reality. It gave Roxanne a divided sensation, as if she had been split down the middle like a piece of pie: She was half in the vampire’s world and half in Sherree’s.

This is not real, thought Roxanne. This is either a really weird party or a really weird nightmare, but this is not real. It relaxed her greatly to reassure herself that this was not real.

“Why did you do that?” said Zach.

“I didn’t expect to be awakened,” said the new vampire. “Naturally I was annoyed to find human fingers all over my shutters. But now that I am up, I recall that it was time anyhow. Our building will be removed from this world in only a week. I have things to do. A new home to find. A nest to build.”

The old vampire nodded glumly. “They are wiping out our habitats.”

Zach burst out laughing, a response that obviously pleased him, because it sounded normal and in control. “You sound like environmentalists,” said Zach. “As if we should preserve a forest for you. Or at least a cemetery.”

The new vampire looked with distaste at Zach. (Zach felt this was probably the best way to be looked at by a vampire.) “You allow them to speak like this in your presence?” the new vampire said to theirs. “This generation is most unpleasant. They have no reverence for the old ways.”

Their own vampire smiled. “They will,” he said. His soft eyes landed especially on Roxanne, who had been pretending this was a bad dream.

“By dawn,” whispered the vampire, looking so deeply into her eyes it felt as if he could see down into her throat, “they will have respect for us again.”

Both vampires were lost in thought over this probability.

“No, we won’t,” said Lacey. “I don’t know where on earth you could get the idea that anybody would respect you. We all despise you. So there.”

The vampires regarded Lacey steadily.

Then they faced each other. “I would like to finish up in here all by myself, if you don’t mind,” said their vampire. “But there is no need for you to go hungry. You need only slip outdoors. There are more humans waiting in the yard.”

“Just standing there?” said the shutter vampire. “Waiting to be taken?” He rubbed his bones together. They clacked. They sounded just like the shutter slats.

Lacey thought perhaps they
were
the shutter slats. No wonder the previous occupants of this house had been so weird. Shutters made of vampire bones.

“Why is the house suddenly so popular?” mused the shutter vampire. His eyebrows were hairy and pointed, like fur-trimmed church windows.

“My understanding,” said their vampire, “is that younger humans enjoy being frightened. It’s the age, you know. Sixteen. Dangerous. To them, of course. Not us.”

The second vampire smiled so broadly that his teeth seemed to circle his skull. “How touching,” he said.

“Precisely.”

“I shall be off, then,” said the second vampire. “I must plunge in,” he added. He liked this turn of phrase, and he watched the teenagers as each one slowly understood the pun — what the plungers were, and into what they plunged.

But the vampire of the shutters did not go out of the window yet. Instead, he studied the six with a sort of melancholy, a kind of deep longing. “You aren’t really going to let five of them go, are you?”