by Phil Malone
Kolka closed it again and turned the other way, through the open portico, heading deeper into the house. Lucado shut the main entrance behind them and followed.
Side by side, they braved the darkened living room, with only a little light from the foyer to show the way. It was cluttered in there. Almost immediately, Kolka bumped into an antique wooden stand. The framed oval mirror that perched on it wobbled precariously, but he managed to catch it before it came crashing down.
This time, both of them felt around for light switches. Kolka ran his hands along peeling wallpaper with no luck. The wall next to Lucado was similarly bare, but in the faint glow of light from the foyer, he spotted a table lamp.
His luck held. The lamp was plugged in, its bulb dim but working. It would take more than a few of them to truly fill the room with light, but one was enough to take in the broad details of their surroundings.
The room where they stood was cluttered with old tables, chairs, threadbare couches, unvarnished wood chests. Everything in it was dusty, dingy, like it hadn’t been vacuumed in decades. It looked like the abode of a shut in.
Doors led to more rooms on either side of them. Directly across from where they entered, a collapsible barrier was pulled shut, hiding even more space from view. They headed to the right, turning on such lights as they could find, trying to keep a mental map of the house in their heads.
It wasn’t easy. They came across a den with a fireplace at one end, a screened in back porch with an industrial grade freezer, a kitchen full of corroded dishes and bugs that scattered when the light came on. They found a dining room where silver serving dishes had turned black from tarnish and they had a view of the living room, where they’d first come in. Another turn took them through a toilet before it brought them back to the den, though they weren’t quite sure how they got there.
Every room opened onto two or more others. A pantry led between shelves of cans and boxes of stale cereal, only for another door to open onto a laundry room. In there, curtains had been drawn across a sliding door that led outside. Another door hid a linen closet with another connecting passage. They came out in the kitchen again.
One more unexplored doorway in the kitchen led to a covered walkway, a shortcut through the night to a side door in the garage. They went inside. Kolka had to feel around again for another light switch while Lucado waited outside, shivering.
He glanced around. The walkway stood open to the back yard, which spread towards a tree line. There were no lights out there, only a vast expanse of empty black woods. He could see the screened off portion of the house from the outside. In the other direction, the garage looked like it might even connect to the house via another door. From where he stood, Lucado had lost all sense of direction. He couldn’t tell where the driveway might be, or where the main garage doors would open.
Ahead of him, Kolka finally found and flipped a light switch. He sucked in his breath. “Jesus Christ,” he said. Lucado hurried to his side, gazing into the garage.
It was a mess of jumbled tools, old lawnmowers, rusted shelving, and a big table covered in what looked like dried blood. Kolka ventured into the garage, kicking aside a few things from underfoot.
When he reached the table, he bent closer, snatching a dirty white rag from a nearby tool chest and rubbing at the edge of the brownish red stain. He glanced back up at Lucado. “This is definitely blood. Without lab work, though, it’s nothing concrete. He might have been skinning a deer on this table, for all we know.”
Lucado’s eyes roamed across a few loops of copper wire, braided together, coiling on the floor. He doubted they’d been used to tie down a deer.
They pushed their way through the debris to another side door, confirming that the garage opened directly into the house. They stood in a storage room of some kind, with cleaning supplies along one wall and cabinets full of old boxes along the other. That led into a wet bar, and from there back into the dining room.
After their tour of the house so far, Lucado felt confused, weary, and hopelessly lost. They hadn’t even finished exploring the ground floor. Kolka wasn’t faring much better. “Come on,” he said, heading through a portico into the living room. “There’s a hallway we haven’t been down yet.”
“I think this house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside,” Lucado muttered.
“We didn’t go all the way around it. We don’t know how big it is. It looks to me like there have been additions over the years. They just built on, connected rooms together, and didn’t care how confusing it got.”
Shadows made every niche behind each piece of furniture in the living room look like another doorway. There wasn’t enough light to dispel them all. The bulb in the table lamp sputtered, threatening to burn out. Lucado tapped it as they passed, for all the good it did.
The doorway at the far end of the living room led to the promised hallway. It was lined with closed doors, and took a corner partway along its length, leaving Kolka and Lucado in the dark as to what lay at that end.
One at a time, they tried the doors. They discovered a bedroom with a door leading to a bathroom with another door that led to another bedroom. The beds were made up, their comforters layered in dust. No one had slept there in years.
Some of the rooms were connected through their closets. The entire house was a muddle of rooms circling back on each other, passages providing shortcuts from one area to another, too many branching paths to remember, much less choose between them. It was paralyzing.
Past another staircase that ascended to a darkened second floor, they found the most damning room of all. Once, it had been a master bathroom. Sallow had repurposed it.
No shower curtain hung above the huge copper bathtub, nor even a shower rod at all. Instead, he’d broken through the plaster ceiling, cleaning up the debris as he went. Leather straps hung from a beam running through the ceiling, unfastened at the moment, though they could easily be used to tighten around something. Or someone.
Beside the tub, a few heavy porcelain pitchers were arrayed. A plastic funnel lay on the floor next to them, sticky with dried blood. Small blood spatters marred the inside of the tub and the tile floor. A dried trickle dripped from the lip of several pitchers. Beside them, an upended stool lay on the floor.
Lucado and Kolka glanced at each other. “I don’t think he was skinning deer in his bathtub,” Lucado said.
“No,” Kolka agreed, turning his attention to the pitchers, the leather straps, the drips of blood. He was careful not to touch anything. “Everything’s dried. Crusty. He hasn’t used it recently. If he has Sanger’s daughter, she might still be alive.”
“I don’t know why you think he has her. If the killer drank Mrs. Sanger’s blood, he might not be the same guy.”
“We don’t know what happened to her blood. Just that it wasn’t at the scene where she was murdered.”
“You told me on the way over here, you said there were bite marks on her neck. Puncture wounds." Lucado opened his mouth wide and tapped a fingertip to his canines. “You said they match these.”
Kolka glanced at him, then turned back to the straps. They were worn, stressed from carrying the weight of something heavy, and discolored with old sweat. “Yeah. I said he’s escalating. I never said I believed in vampires.”
In his frustration, Lucado almost kicked the stool across the room. Only his bad leg and the threat of falling over restrained him. “It’s pretty clear that Sallow is definitely your killer,” he said, contenting himself with the satisfaction of having been right.
“I can’t argue with that." Kolka straightened up. He holstered his pistol and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “I can have the police here in fifteen minutes.”
“Please do. I’d feel much safer if we weren’t out here on our own." Lucado poked his head back out into the hallway, checking in both directions to make sure they were still alone. With the way the house was laid out, someone could sneak up on them and they’d never know. The thought made his
stomach feel like ice.
In the quiet of the hallway, Lucado suddenly heard a distant thump. A tiny sound, almost inaudible, like someone tossing their shoes on the floor. He cocked his head, listening, trying to tune out the quiet murmur of Kolka’s voice coming from the bathroom.
Did the sound come from above him? Was there someone on the second floor, listening for noise from the first? Lucado wondered how loud he and Kolka had been. Not very, he thought, but it was easier to let your guard down after walking around without finding anyone for fifteen minutes or so.
Kolka came out of the bathroom. “At this time of morning, it’ll take them about thirty minutes. We just have to sit tight for now.”
Lucado grabbed him by the arm, put a finger to his lips, then pointed towards the ceiling. “I think there’s someone upstairs.”
Kolka’s eyes followed Lucado’s finger. He slipped the cell phone back into his pocket and reached again for his gun. He nodded his head in the direction of one of the doors they’d just passed. “Stairs are right there,” he said, under his breath.
“Didn’t you say we have to sit tight?”
“For half an hour? When Sallow might have the girl upstairs? No chance." He glanced down at Lucado’s bad leg and narrowed his eyes. “Can you make it up those steps?”
“Eventually. I’m not eager to try.”
Kolka stepped past him, keeping his gun pointed toward the ground. “Just don’t fall too far behind.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
There were no lights on in the hallway, and Eddie pulled the trap door back up after she let go and dropped to the floor. Melody found herself alone, in the dark, in an unfamiliar house with nothing but a broken piece of wood to defend herself.
It was too dark to see. Melody held out a hand, running it along the wall beside her, and chose a direction at random. She kept hoping she would feel a light switch beneath her fingers, though part of her wasn’t sure she would turn on the lights even if she found them. If there was a vampire lurking nearby, she didn’t want to alert it to her presence.
Every other doorway in the hall stood open. A shiver traveled up her spine each time she passed in front of one of those blackened, sightless porticoes. She couldn’t help but imagine the vampire standing unseen in the room, watching her walk by. Every time the thought occurred to her, she had to bite back a scream and hurry on.
When she passed the fifth open door, Melody started to wonder if the hallway was arranged in one big circle. She tried to remember how many corners she had taken. Three? Or just two?
She hesitated, turning one way and then the other, chewing on her bottom lip. No one was there to hold her hand, to show her the way. She was stuck. She’d never escape the house if she couldn’t see where she was going.
At the next open door she found, Melody felt around just inside the door. Quickly enough, she found the light switch. She held her breath, and flipped the switch on.
A bare bulb in the overhead fixture popped on, bathing the room in dim yellow light. Melody found herself looking into a room with a bed shoved up against one wall, rumpled sheets suggesting it had been slept in recently. A dresser stood next to it. Dirty clothes littered the floor. Against the other wall, she saw a desk piled with magazines. Nudie magazines, she noticed. Some of them looked decades old.
Well at least he doesn’t sleep in a coffin.
She glanced over her shoulder, checking the hallway in both directions, just to make sure no one was trying to sneak up on her.
For a moment, everything remained quiet and still. Then she heard a creak. She wanted to tell herself it was the sound of an old house settling, but she knew a footstep when she heard one.
Heart in her throat, Melody dashed across the hallway to another open door. Enough light reached it from the bedroom for her to see an empty bathroom, although the brief glimpse of herself moving in the mirror was almost enough to elicit a shriek.
She sheltered behind the door, peering out at the hallway through the crack where the hinged door swung open. Holding her breath, she clutched the fragment of broken chair to her chest.
Let the vampire come, she thought. Let him investigate the room where I turned the light on. Maybe she could get him in the back.
Better yet, he might pass by and ignore her altogether.
A door further down the hall creaked open. Melody heard footsteps in the carpet, barely audible. She tightened her grip on the stake.
Just on the other side of the door, she saw the silhouette of a man step in front of the bedroom light. He paused. Shuffling towards the bedroom, he placed his hand on the door and pushed it open all the way. Melody spotted something in his other hand, raised up, pointing at the ceiling. It looked almost like a gun.
His back was to her. She saw his head turning one way, then the other, surveying the bedroom’s interior. It was now or never.
Silently, she emerged from behind the bathroom door, pointing the stake in the direction of his back. The palm of her hand braced the blunt end, prepared to put all her strength, all her weight behind it. Hopefully her aim would be true. Hopefully she was strong enough to reach the man’s heart.
Melody lunged at him.
“Wait!”
The man whirled around. Melody almost tripped over her own feet. Her head whipped in the direction he’d come. Another man stood there, halfway out the door, frantically waving his arm at her.
The first man caught her arm and plucked the stake from her grasp. He glanced at it, then looked up at her, still gripping her wrist.
Melody’s heart pounded. Her one chance, and she blew it. There was no point in even struggling. “Shit,” she muttered.
Her captor frowned. “Melody Sanger?” he said.
“Of course that’s her, detective. Alive and well, thank God." The second man, the one who shouted in the first place and caught her by surprise, leaned heavily against the wall as he emerged fully into the hallway. He was older; Melody couldn’t tell by how much. In his free hand, he carried a short, thin sword.
The first man, the detective, let go of her arm. He handed her the stake and holstered his gun. “Melody, I’m Detective Kolka." He gestured toward his companion. “This is Mr. Lucado. We came to get you out of here.”
Melody looked from one man to the other. “You’re police? You’re not vampires?”
“I’m police. There’s no such thing as vampires.”
Lucado shuffled towards her. “Feel free to disagree with the detective, Miss Sanger." He nodded at the stake in her hands. “We’re pretty sure there’s no one downstairs, but keep that handy, just in case.”
Tears welled up in Melody’s eyes. Rescue was something she hadn’t looked for, hadn’t counted on. She wanted to hug both of them, but it seemed a little forward.
“Is there anyone else on this floor?” Detective Kolka asked her.
“In the attic,” she nodded. “Another guy, Eddie. I was tied up and he helped me get loose and gave me this." She brandished the stake. “He said he was dying. The vampire’s been feeding on him.”
“Where’s the attic?”
Melody looked up at the ceiling, but didn’t see the trap door. She’d been walking too long, taken too many corners. But it had to be nearby.
From below, they heard a door slam suddenly. The sound of it thundered through the house, making the walls tremble. All three of them jumped.
“Sallow!” a voice bellowed. “I know you’re here somewhere! Time’s up!”
Lucado turned white. His sword quivered in his hands. Melody felt grateful that she wasn’t the only one feeling terrified. “That has to be Bleda,” she whispered. “He killed my mother.”
“Kolka,” Lucado hissed. “Whether you believe in vampires or not, this man will kill us if he catches us. We have to get out of here!”
“What about the guy in the attic?”
Melody swallowed. “He told me to leave him,” she said, and hated herself.
Detective Kolka glanced from Melody
to Lucado and back. He took her hand. “Then let’s make sure we don’t get caught.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Kolka remembered seeing more than one staircase as they wandered through the ground floor. He didn’t know which way the person below-- Bleda, according to the girl-- would come upstairs. He doubted a scared girl and a handicapped old geezer could outrun him.
Worst of all, a horrible, absurd notion kept circling through Kolka’s thoughts, no matter how he tried to push it from his mind.
What if I shoot, and the bullets don’t kill him?
He cursed himself for even entertaining the thought, but he couldn’t shake it. He’d seen enough as a cop to know that insanity was contagious. Everyone else’s madness was starting to infect him, too. Lucado had his little sword; Melody had a scrap of broken wood. Kolka wondered why he felt so disarmed, when he was the one with a gun.
“Come on,” he said. He brushed past Lucado, heading back to the staircase. On the way down, he’d have to watch for that one step that creaked noisily. Lucado didn’t appear overjoyed at the prospect of navigating the steps he’d only just managed to climb.
He was almost halfway down when the door at the bottom of the steps swung open. Kolka froze. The man at the bottom looked up, locked eyes with him, and raised a furrowed brow.
“Who the hell are you?”
Kolka raised his handgun and aimed it at the man. “Don’t move! We’ve seen the mess you made in that downstairs bathroom.”
The man glanced behind him, frowning. “Oh, that. Not my mess. This isn’t even my house." He looked past Kolka, noticing Melody and Lucado for the first time. “Aren’t you Sanger’s kid? And you,” he stared hard at Lucado, “aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
