Fatal Bargain (3 page)

But even without the information she might have gotten from late-night movies, Sherree knew that she did not have to worry about her toes.

The vampire’s attention was elsewhere.

And his teeth — his teeth seemed to be everywhere.

They slid in and out of focus, as if lenses on cameras had fogged up.

Sherree tightened herself into a ball, thinking: Lacey’s standing up. He’ll take her first. I’ll run. He can’t do two at once.

When the phone rang that night, and it was Randy, Roxanne bit back a laugh. If there was anybody who did not make waves, who did not set trends, and who was not interesting, it was poor Randy. He was the classic case of the kid with the terrific car, the terrific media room, and unlimited use of credit cards. People hung out with him to use him, and Randy had no idea.

Roxanne could not imagine what Randy was talking about, wanting to have a party in a deserted house. Roxanne being Roxanne, she pointed out the flaws in his planning: how they would have to break in, which was illegal; how the police might be called by neighbors; how very possibly the house was structurally unsound and they might fall through a stair tread or otherwise hurt themselves. How, assuming they did get in, a dark house might be interesting for a minute or two, but then what were they going to do?

“Lighten up, Roxanne,” said Randy. “There are no neighbors, and back when they built that house, they built ʼem to last for centuries. Nothing’s broken in there.”

“The shutters are,” Roxanne pointed out. “It gives me the creeps just to drive by. Especially now, with everything around the place leveled.”

The house stuck out of the ground as if it were a growth or a mold. Strange twisted lightning rods stabbed the sky from the peaks of the porch roof and the ugly tower. Bulldozers had razed everything around it, even pulling down the immense dark hedge of towering hemlocks, but the downed trees had never been hauled off. They lay on the ground, dead and brown, a barricade of scaly bark and rotting limbs.

“But what’s the point?” said Roxanne. Roxanne’s life was filled with master plans. She did not like to undertake anything unless there was a good result from it.

“Something to do,” said Randy.

Roxanne’s calendar was very full. She did not need “something to do.” She was willing to rearrange her schedule only if it were something
worthwhile
to do. “But what will we do once we’re there?” said Roxanne.

“I’m not telling yet,” said Randy.

Roxanne wondered if this was because he had no idea yet.

“I’m just promising,” said Randy, “that it’ll be a night to end all nights.”

And that was a tempting phrase. Roxanne even agreed to help Lacey lie to her parents, although Lacey was about as interesting to Roxanne as dust under the bed. Even after she found out Sherree was going, too, Roxanne stuck with it. It would be an amusing test of Bobby’s social abilities: Could he juggle two girls at once? In front of his two skeptical male friends? If the other guests had been people who mattered deeply to Roxanne, perhaps she would not have risked it. But even Bobby had ceased to be at the top of her list. It was her senior year and she was ready to shrug off these younger kids and get back to what counted.

Roxanne looked around the tower.

She looked at the swirling cloak as it waited to learn which human body would be encapsulated within it.

She looked at the five teenagers trapped with her.

One of us must be sacrificed, she thought. One of us has to spend the night with a vampire.

Well, it won’t be me.

Z
ACH WAS HAVING DIFFICULTY
pushing the little black lever on his flashlight. He could not seem to make it go forward. His hands were trembling. He, who was always in control of a situation (Zach picked his situations, so he would never be in one he could not control in the first place), could not even control his own fingers.

Zach had to go back quite a few years to remember being afraid. He was often nervous. Zach had high standards. When he entered a class he did it with style. When he made an introduction, he was amusing. When he told a joke, he timed the punch line just right. When he took an exam, he got 95. When he went to a party, he was the life of it. He rehearsed all these events; he actually practiced room-entering, sauntering offstage, tie tying, laughing cruelly versus laughing gently. And because it mattered so much to him that he got these details right, Zach was accustomed to being nervous.

But afraid?

Zach frowned, remembering. He had probably been five, because he easily pictured his Halloween costume: He was Superman in a big red cape his older sisters had worn before him, but he had gotten separated from the group and found himself in a black yard with evilly grinning pumpkins, and a skeleton swinging from a tree, and spiders cascading off a gutter.

With abject terror he had fallen to the ground. He had not even been brave enough to run. He had not even screamed. He had just collapsed, a little puddle of panic.

He had refused ever again to be a little puddle of panic.

Zach controlled his fingers. He got the flashlight on. He moved its rays in a circle around the tower. The light revealed five terrified faces. Nobody was screaming, nobody was even running. They were little puddles of panic.

The vampire was not visible. Either the vampire had told the truth when he said he was not going to stay while they made the decision, or he was composed of a material that did not shine in the dark.

We shouldn’t have come up here, Zach thought, furious with himself for making this error. If we’d stayed downstairs…

Well, they hadn’t.

Zach was having some difficulty planning a strategy. It seemed to take so much more of his energy to hold the flashlight still than this minor physical action should require. His heart was pounding so hard that he did not seem to have much left over for running and escaping.

For the first time, Zach wished he were a jock like Bobby.

Bobby trained for this kind of stuff. All that bench-pressing and lap-running — now it would pay off. Whereas studying for British literature exams — that would get Zach precious little distance from a vampire.

Zach focused the shaft of light on the single, open door. Stairs led down to a broad landing on the bedroom floor below the tower, twisted once, and then led down to the old front hall. The teenagers had not, of course, come in the front door. Standing on the old creaking porch, they had peeled back a large slab of plywood that had been nailed over a broken window in the old dining room. Randy had brought along a clawed hammer to pry up the nails.

Zach disliked taking risks without rehearsing them first.

There was quite a bit that could go wrong if he tried to run ahead of the others. Zach flashed the light temptingly out the door and down the tower stairs, hoping one of the others would bolt, and Zach could follow in the wake, let someone else take the risks for him.

Ever since the vampire had appeared, the tower had been filled with a weird combination of light and dark. There were no lights, and yet Bobby could see himself and the others. The vampire had no color, and no form, and yet Bobby had been able to see him perfectly.

I possess the door
, the vampire had said.

Bobby had believed it. The mushroom skin, the dripping fangs, the oozing cloak — it could possess anything it wanted.

But it had evaporated, leaving behind its strange illumination of the tower. And now he believed it less. Even a vampire could not possess air, and air was all that could fill the door opening.

Zach leveled the beam of his flashlight on the doorway and Bobby was relieved: The beam passed through the door. If light rays could travel in that space, so could Bobby.

Bobby planned his route.

He was a little worried about stumbling on the stairs. He’d been teasing Roxanne and Sherree so much about things that go bump in the night he had paid no attention to the layout of the house. Once he left here, he’d have to move it; there could be no fumbling on this pass.

Bobby was a player of team sports, but it did not occur to him that perhaps this was a sport and perhaps he had a team with him. He thought only of saving himself as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Bobby took a running start from the back of the tower room and hurled himself forward.

Sherree had never been afraid of anything, either. There was no need. The people around Sherree did everything for her.

Sherree fulfilled the Barbie-doll premise: She was incredibly thin and yet voluptuous. She had masses of fluffy hair and yet none of it ever fell into her oval face. Her blue eyes were immense, and she wore tinted contact lenses to make them bluer. She even dressed like a Barbie doll. No skirt was too short, no top was too glitzy, no tan was too dark.

Just two weeks ago, her car had stopped working while she was driving along some unknown road. She didn’t wonder what had gone wrong, and she didn’t worry about what to do next. She didn’t even bother to get her cell phone out of her purse. Not too far down the road, she could see an immense sign from some gas station poking up above the tallest trees.

Sherree strolled up to the garage. Sure enough, the men who worked there came trotting out, eager to rescue her. All she had to do was twinkle at them.

Twinkling worked.

Sherree had planned to twinkle through all her problems. But she did not want to twinkle at a vampire. The vampire would want her most, because everybody always did. And she was dressed the skimpiest because Sherree always was.

She knew instinctively that the vampire wouldn’t want a boy. That left Roxanne, who was a tough sarcastic type, and Lacey, who was a ditz. They were pretty enough, in their own boring ways, but that was all. I mean really, thought Sherree, what other choices does this vampire have but me?

Sherree assumed that Zach or Bobby would save her.

She did not assume that Randy would. Randy was a little too meager in personality and body to save anybody.

Sherree studied Zach and knew that he was analyzing the situation. She had faith in his brain. He would find a good strategy. She watched Bobby. The athlete drew himself together. He had a fine body, more heavily muscled than most boys his age. No doubt he could rip a T-shirt’s sleeves by clenching his biceps. Bobby took a few steps backward, away from the door, gathering himself.

Sherree unwound from her terrified crouch. This was not completely different from cheerleading. You had to bounce off a gym floor from the most ridiculous positions and leap up. She would spring up and follow Bobby down the stairs.

Bobby turned himself into a battering ram.

Sherree lifted like a sprinter at the starting line.

Bobby flung himself across the tower and plunged through the door.

Except that he did not go through.

He remained in midair. Pinned to the atmosphere like a Velcro wall-jumper. Sherree stared. The door was open, and Bobby was hanging there. Not as if there were a noose around his neck, but as if he were an insect in the vampire’s collection, pinned at the joints on the bulletin board.

The vampire indeed possessed the door. And now, clearly, he also possessed Bobby.

Roxanne had the hammer.

Her parents were neatness fanatics: everything in its place. If you left your shampoo bottle on the tub rim, they freaked. If you left a CD out of its plastic holder, they freaked. If you allowed a used glass to rest on the counter instead of popping it instantly inside the dishwasher, they freaked.

So, of course, when the teenagers had gotten into the deserted mansion, and Randy yanked the plywood back to hide the opening he had made, and then absently set the hammer down on the same windowsill they had crawled over, Roxanne picked it up.

They might accidentally leave the hammer behind.

Or not be able to find it again in the dark.

Especially if their flashlight batteries ran down.

It was an ordinary enough hammer, slim handle, hard metal head and claws. She was not wearing a belt in her jeans, so she shoved the handle through a belt loop. It hung satisfyingly against her thigh, making her feel like a tough workman.

When Bobby flew against the vampire’s space, and stuck there, Roxanne found herself wondering if she would have to pry him off with the claws of the hammer.

“Bobby?” said Roxanne stupidly. “Are you okay?”

Bobby said nothing.

“Well,” said Zach, in his most maddening, above-it-all preppy voice, “I guess that lets out the door as an escape route.” Zach actually laughed. “You look a little strange up there, Bobby, my man.”

Bobby said nothing.

In spite of his teasing, Zach had not been amused. In fact, he had been unable to maintain his grip on the flashlight, which he dropped when Bobby smashed into the vampire’s space.

The pounding of his heart had increased. He felt like the bass drum in a marching band — he was nothing but a huge reverberating gong. His heart was thrashing around his chest just as Bobby had thrashed against thin air.

I’m afraid, thought Zach. He hated himself for it, hated the vampire for causing it, hated the others because they would surely see, and know.

Lacey retrieved the flashlight.

She examined Bobby’s predicament. Then she examined Bobby.

Bobby said nothing.

He was stuck there, and yet when she put her own hand into the air around him, she could not feel anything. She had expected to meet resistance. An invisible balloon skin. She groped around Bobby, but could feel no substance from which to peel him away. He was breathing, his lungs swelled beneath her touch, but still he said nothing.

“Eeeuuuhh!” shrieked Sherree. “How can you put your bare hand out there? What if the vampire touches you?”

Lacey shuddered. The vampire was there, of course. No doubt he was taking pleasure in this; it was, after all, the first entertainment he had had in a long time. But somehow she did not think that her hand was going to encounter his slime.

Her hand encountered nothing at all.

Lacey latched her hands around Bobby’s waist and pulled, but he did not come free. And he still said nothing. Nothing at all.