“ — and I still can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t marry me. Your father approves. You mother would have approved. My Lord, woman, you don’t hate me. I know that. “
“True,” she said, her hands clasped in her lap. She stared at the bellowing fire Timmons had built for them, at the sparks, at the red logs, at the embers on the grate. “But … damn you, Jack,” she said softly, “you know I don’t love you.”
“That does not deter me. If it’s important, it will come to you in time.”
She tried to be pleasant. “I don’t want it to come in time, Jack. I want it first, not later so that perhaps it will be never. “
“I see.”
“Dear Jack,” she said fondly. “No, you don’t see. But maybe someday you will.”
“I suppose you’d rather live in a hovel with that detective.”
“Now that’s not fair, Jack! That’s not fair at all.”
A sudden pounding on the door had Foxworth out of his chair and standing behind her, one hand on her shoulder as Timmons passed the room’s entrance and vanished for a moment. There was a whispering, a hinge protesting, and Ned Stockton was there.
“Pam,” he said, after a brief nod to Foxworth, “I’d like to talk with Miss Chambers, if I can.”
“Ned, what’s wrong?”
“Please, Pam.”
“Well,” Foxworth muttered almost to himself,” ‘Pam’, is it?”
“Oh Jack, do be quiet.” She crossed to Ned and looked up to him, worried. “I’d like to help you, Ned. but she isn’t here.”
“Not yet? Then what about your father?”
“He’s left orders not to be disturbed,” Timmons said from the hall.
“And I don’t suppose Detective Driscoll has dropped by, either,” said Ned sourly.
“Mr. Stockton.” Foxworth said, still standing behind the chair, “would you mind telling us what all this is about?”
Ned hesitated, but he’d known Pamela too long and wasn’t afraid to be blunt; the only unknown factor was Jack Foxworth’s gossiping tongue. But he was tired. and he was cold, and the brandy Foxworth held out to him was too tempting to pass.
“All right,” he said as he walked slowly to an offered chair, “but you’ve got to promise me, Pam, that you won’t toss me out if you think that I’m crazy.”
“Ned.” she said smiling and hanging onto his arm. “I’ve known since we were children how crazy you are.”
So he talked, ignoring Foxworth’s increasingly snide comments in favor of Pamela’s silent attention. And when he was done he leaned back and stared at his empty glass.
“A hundred dollars in gold.” he muttered, “to the man who can tell me what the hell’s going on.”
Silence; the fire the only voice.
“Real gold, sir, or are you speaking figuratively.”
The three looked up quickly, not realizing the butler had entered the room. He was just beyond the reach of the nearest lamp’s light, casting hollowed shadows on a face Ned thought drawn tight in fear.
He looked to Pamela, who only shrugged, and to Foxworth who smirked. “Real gold, Mr. Timmons,” he said doubtfully. “I will personally clean out my bank account and put it in your hands if you can tell me what I don’t know.”
“What you don’t know is vampires, sir,” Timmons said quietly.
“Really.” He kept his voice neutral. “Who?”
“All of them, sir. All the dead are walking.”
The Third Night
10
The break in the cold spell continued well into Saturday, and by midafternoon the brick pavements of Centre Street were crowded with pedestrians blessing the opportunity to be rid of their homes, even if it was for just an hour or two. The street and side avenues were filled and flowing as well, with coaches and open carriages vying sedately for space with a few single riders on highstepping mounts and highwheeled carts hauling foodstuffs and hard goods from the farmers in the valley. The sun was high and spring-golden, the sky too blue to look at without squinting, and the few remaining snowpatches melted swiftly and silently into the gutters.
There was a bank on the comer of Centre and Steuben, of greystone and marble with frosted arched windows and a uniformed guard looking bored at the stoop. Next to it, a story lower, was Oliver Crenshaw’s modest-looking shop, in its single display window a shelf covered with black velvet, and on the black velvet a solitary silver fruit bowl ornately engraved with oak leaves and laurel. By the time the sun had lowered to the treetops, Pamela was there for the third time that day, staring longingly at the bowl, her hands encased in a dark fur muff, her shoulders covered by a half-length brown shawl. Her bonnet was sable-trimmed, the ribbons dangling over her chest a contrasting brilliant red. And her hair, caught now by the sunlight, seemed more gold than yellow.
Beautiful, she thought as she shifted to see the bowl from a slightly different angle. Marvelous.
But though she appreciated the silversmith’s craft and the art that went with it, there was no smile on her lips. She had fled the house two hours ago, hoping that a stroll in the warming air would revive her spirits. Yet nothing had worked. She had been in nearly every establishment on the street, chatted with every seamstress and smith, and still nothing was able to shake the depression she felt.
And she knew what was causing it.
All the dead are walking.
It was ridiculous on the face of it, and Timmons ought to have been ashamed for even bringing it up. Ned, when he’d heard the butler’s solemn pronouncement had gaped in astonishment until a bitter laugh had escaped from his throat. Then he’d muttered crossly about servants and fools and stormed from the house, barely pausing long enough to tell her he’d return today to talk with Saundra. Jack had been less directly rude; nevertheless, he made it icily clear that none of them appreciated the humor in Timmons’ jest. When the man protested he wasn’t jesting at all, Jack smiled gallantly and fetched his own hat and coat, kissed her lightly on the cheek, promising too he’d see her before Sunday.
All the dead —
She moved on, her gaze listless, her stride timid. None of this was working out the way it was supposed to. Though the twinkle in Ned’s eye showed her he still cared, he was too busy now with all these horrible killings to flirt with her properly; and her father refused her entreaties to see a physician when he rose late again; and there was Jack and his persistence, the stories on the street of the wolf that got away from the police in the park, and how the man who’d murdered Mrs. Bartlett had been shot a dozen times and never lost a drop of blood; and Saundra.
She scowled suddenly, startling a woman who’d just left the green grocer’s. Saundra, her oldest friend, her dearest friend, hadn’t passed more than a dozen words with her since her arrival. What kind of reunion was that? What kind of way was that to bring back the old times?
She glanced up at a clock in a nearby haberdasher’s and felt a faint shudder. She knew she was being foolish, knew she was being empty-headed, but ever since this morning she was dreading the night.
It occurred to her then that maybe she could stop in at the police station to see Ned. She had waited as long as she could for him to return, and when he hadn’t that was when she’d taken her black from the stable and ridden into town.
Without thinking, she turned sharply, and collided with a man rushing past her toward the Pike. They stepped back as if burnt, startled and embarrassed, and Pamela was about to push on with an automatic apology when she recognized John Webber. She smiled, but it was an effort — the spindly old man was wearing a battered beaver hat, an ankle-length black coat, and at least three heavy mufflers wrapped chokingly around his neck. A second look, and she saw that his face was deathly pale, his eyes deep in their sockets and heavily, darkly pouched.
“Miss Squires,” he said, tipping his hat quickly, as if he were afraid to expose the top of his skull.
Recovering swiftly from her astonishment, she put a hand to his arm as he was about to
hurry off. “Doctor,” she said anxiously, “a word, please, about my father.”
“No time,” he told her, his eyes shifting rapidly from side to side. “No time.” He stared at the clock in the shop window, at the sun, at his shadow on the pavement. “Lord, no time at all.” Then suddenly he leaned close and peered intently into her face. “It ain’t the crazies, y’know. God knows I’ve done things in my time, but it ain’t the crazies.” And before she could stop him he was gone, slipping into the crowd with another tip of his hat.
She considered following him, then changed her mind; what she definitely needed now was a strong dose of Ned Stockton — if nothing else, maybe he could explain why everyone in her house seemed to have gone round the bend; just, she thought sadly, like old Doc Webber.
But she hadn’t gone three steps when a matronly woman bundled in expensive silks and sables stepped out of the bank with a companion who could have been her twin.
“Pamela Squires!” she said, nearly shouting, causing not a few passers-by to smile to themselves. “My dear, how delightful to see you.” She turned to her friend, one less rotund but far removed from slender. “Didn’t I tell you, Gertrude, this would be our lucky day?”
The second woman, whose dark lace shawl was embedded with glittering gems, nodded so rapidly her bonnet nearly tipped from her white hair. “You did, Dorothy, you certainly did.” She placed a white-gloved hand to her rouged and sunken cheek. “And you were right, as always. “
“I’m always right,” Dorothy Hawksted declared. “As I told my daughter-in-law just the other day — you will name your child Ephraim, I said, because I just know it’ll be a boy.” She smiled at Pamela triumphantly. “You see?”
Pamela didn’t see, but she returned the smile gamely, her attention somewhat distracted by a quartet of young men racing across the street and down one block toward Chancellor Avenue and the police station. They were warmly dressed, and they were carrying guns.
“Well, my dear,” Mrs. Hawksted said, “I certainly hope Grandon isn’t going to wait long before his next soiree. I should think the attraction would be considerable, don’t you?”
Mrs. Mumford tittered into a palm.
Pamela held the smile. “Attraction, Mrs. Hawksted?”
“Why, Mr. Brastov, of course,” the woman said with a puzzled frown. “The Count.”
“The … Count?”
“Oh, my dear,” Mrs. Mumford whispered, “I suppose we really shouldn’t be bandying the name about on the streets like this, but surely — ”
“Gertrude, please!” Mrs. Hawksted admonished.
Another man darted across Chancellor from the other side; he too was armed.
Pamela frowned while the two women nattered on about the man they had met the night of Bernhardt’s party. And though they were clearly delving for more information, she paid them no heed. Suddenly she felt anxious, and before she realized what she was doing, she muttered an apology and pushed hastily between them, not bothering to look back as she dashed across the street.
At the comer, however, she almost changed her mind. There were several uniformed patrolmen standing in front of the station, each of them holding a rifle, each watching silently as a larger group of armed and angrily muttering civilians climbed into a buckboard. Lucas Stockton was at the curb, his strong voice issuing directions without having to shout. Onlookers were filling the pavement, and not a few were making loud and derisive comments about the police’s inability to catch a simple animal, not to mention a murderer with a hundred bullet holes in him.
She sidled around the crowd, clutching her purse close to her stomach and frowning at the air of hostility she felt. This wasn’t like the Station, not like it at all; they’d had their share of deaths before, violent and otherwise, but never had the people turned against their protectors. It unnerved her, and she was about to push her way inside when she saw Ned on the steps. He recognized her with a brief grateful nod, turned back to whisper something to a young man she knew was Richard Driscoll, then hurried to join her. Before she could say anything, however, he took hold of her arm and pulled her away.
“Hungry?” he said.
She nodded.
“Let’s go to the Inn. The whole damned place has gone mad, and I need some peace and quiet before I start screaming.”
There was no chance for her to comment; she was led through the crowd and away, down the Avenue toward a hundred-year old farmhouse whose first floor had been turned into the village’s most popular restaurant. Immediately they stepped through the front door, Ned was recognized and, at a soft word, they were brought to a quiet booth at the back of the smallest room of three dining rooms. There were no other guests visible, and the waiter only nodded when he was asked to bring them brandy and nothing else.
Pamela watched him apprehensively. It was obvious he’d had little sleep the night before, and his brown hair was atangle over his forehead. He kept his hands clasped on the table, the knuckles pale. the fingers stirring across the backs of his hands. Finally, she lay a hand over them, calmed them, and looked at him with a sad, concerned smile.
“I don’t know,” he said at her silent question. “Oxrun is going mad and I don’t know why. Unless,” he added with a sour grin, “I believe what Timmons told us last night.”
“But it’s not true.”
“You know that and I know that,” he whispered heatedly, “but try to tell them out there! And it’s all thanks to good old Rick. Last night, instead of taking the men into the park as he was ordered, he got a brilliant idea that one of his wife’s books might give him a clue to what’s happening here. So the fool races directly home and reads until dawn. And then … ” He swallowed his growing anger and shook his head once, sharply. “And then he comes in this morning with a story about … about some damned thing called … ”
He interrupted himself with a loud noise of disgust and flung himself back into his high-backed bench seat. A look to the beamed ceiling, to the fireplace nearby, and he sighed, wearily.
“He found reference to something called a werewolf,” he said, “and by god, wouldn’t you know he didn’t mind at all telling everyone he saw. Christ, the word was out in an hour. You saw it, then. Men and boys with rifles, guns, even a few clubs. It’s disgusting.”
She tried to think of something to say, but was too appalled. It was incredible that people she’d known all her life were taken by a fairy tale, even more that men like Ned were forced to take a back seat to myth and superstition.
“Your father … ?” she said.
“Oh yes,” he said. “Oh yes, he was out there, you saw him. He said he didn’t see any harm in it. After all, with all those men out there, they were bound to find something.”
“But that’s insane!”
“Of course it is! Don’t you think I know that?”
She leaned away from his vehemence, felt instant sympathy for his plight. And immediately the sympathy grew her own problems seemed to fade into insignificance.
“And then,” he said, “there’s good old John Webber.”
“Oh my.”
Ned frowned. “What’s the matter, Pam?”
She told him quickly of her meeting with the doctor on the street, and Ned was nodding before she finished.
“Right. The crazies. He came into my office this morning, trying to tell me the bodies he has in his morgue were trying to get at him last night. They walked, he said. They talked to him, he said.”
A deep breath expanded his chest, a breath that slipped slowly between his lips as his weariness overtook him and he sagged. Pamela once again covered his hands with hers, and she held them when the waiter returned for their order. When Ned suddenly protested he’d lost his appetite, she scolded him playfully and made sure the waiter understood she was the one who was in charge, not the detective. After the man left, with a faint smile on his lips, she released him and clasped her hands on the edge of the table.
“This is going to spread, you know,” she to
ld him.
“I know. Lord, do I know that.”
“Then you must stop it.”
He stared at her. “I must … and how am I supposed to do that, Pam? How am I supposed to stop a whole village from going insane?”
“It’s very simple. You must find the murderer, and the wolf, and bring them in. And you must do it before anyone else.”
His mouth opened, closed, opened again and he laughed. A series of barking sounds at first, then a slow climb into a full range of laughter that brought tears to his eyes and a grim set to Pamela’s mouth. She waited until he’d regained control, then repeated herself firmly. And before he could interrupt, she lifted a palm for silence.
“I’m not crazy, you know,” she said. “I don’t believe in these vampires of Timmons’, or that werewolf of Rick Driscoll’s. But something odd is going on.” Without the bother of debate, then, she told him about the house, the silence, the odd behavior of her father that worried her so.
“I am not an uneducated woman, Ned, and I don’t hold with charms and spells. But as I listen to you and I think about it, I wonder. I really do wonder.”
“Then what do you suggest?” he asked.
She ignored the sarcasm and picked up the menu instead. “I suggest we eat first. Then I suggest we drop in on Mr. Webber and see for ourselves what frightened him. He’s old, but he’s not stupid.”
“And Saundra as well,” he said quietly, studiously avoiding looking at her. “Pam, I hate to say this, but all this mess started the same time she arrived in the Station.”
“Ned Stockton!”
“But it’s true, and you know it. And, like your father, it may be nothing. And then again she may know something that’s important to us, something even she may not be aware of.”
“Ned, I’m speechless. But as long as you’re going to interrogate my dearest friend — ”
“Now, Pam … ”
“ — why don’t you interrogate Mr. Brastov, as well. After all, he came in on the train with Saundra that night. Maybe he knows something.”
She would have gone on, expressing her indignation and fueling her anger, but the look on Ned’s face slowly brought her to silence. It was one of amazement, and startled disbelief.
The Universe of Horror Volume 1: The Soft Whisper of the Dead (Neccon Classic Horror) Page 7
