What are they talking about? she heard her inner voice screaming. Her eyes cast wildly about at them all. Vampires? Vampires? What the hell are they TALKING about? She shuddered painfully, and her fingernails dug into her bare arms.
The one named Danny poured himself a beer and started to speak again. She turned to face him. His eyes, behind the wire-rimmed glasses, looked distorted and far too large for his head. She suppressed a sob that nobody seemed to notice.
As the pit yawned, wider, beneath her feet.
“It started when we went to see Nosferatu,” Danny said eagerly. “It’s this great German vampire movie, directed by Werner Herzog and …” He saw very quickly that they didn’t want to hear about the film. With a little nervous laugh, he continued.
“Anyway, we were both sitting there,” indicating Claire, who nodded, “and all of a sudden, we both got hit with the same wild thought. We didn’t even know each other at the time … we were just sitting next to each other in the theatre … when we both got hit with it at the same time.”
“What if there were a vampire in the subways?” Claire said, reenacting the moment. Danny laughed … the only one to do so … and continued.
“Yeah. Because there’s this one scene where Nosferatu lands in England, and his ship is full of rats. That made us think about the big mass murder … I guess it was Monday night, or Tuesday morning … that happened on the subway. Remember?”
Everybody nodded but Josalyn this time. Danny noticed for the first time that she didn’t look well at all: like she might shudder to pieces at any second. He looked away quickly and went on, a bit shakier himself.
“The whole back of the train was full of rats. That’s what the papers said, anyway. And one guy had his throat torn out, like an animal did it. Vampires are supposed to be able to change into all kinds of shit. Like wolves, for instance.”
“But did they find any people with the blood sucked out of them?” Allan asked, turning to face him directly.
“Well, no, but …”
“Well, then, why did it have to be a vampire? I mean, it seems to me like twin puncture wounds in the jugular vein would be the thing you’d want to look for, right?” When Danny didn’t say anything, Allan’s nod was grimly triumphant. “That’s a pretty off-the-wall theory, if you ask me.”
“The whole thing’s off-the-wall,” Ian said, his eyes thoughtful. “That doesn’t mean that it’s not happening.”
“Yeah, but …”
“It might have been just because we were stoned, and we made some kind of subconscious association,” Danny broke in now. “But like I said, it hit both of us at once; and it was a very strong, gut-level kind of feeling. We knew it was true. We just knew it. And then …”
“What are you talking about?” Josalyn stood up suddenly. Her eyes were wide and crazy; her face was flushed; she was shaking so hard that the whole table vibrated as she leaned her hands upon it. “What is all this vampire garbage? I don’t understand! What does this have to do with anything?”
Nobody knew how to react. Ian mouthed the word whoa and sank back into his wooden chair. Danny gaped in silence. Stephen swallowed a lump of something nasty and cringed. Something nastier was on the way. He could feel it coming.
It was Claire who reached out to take Josalyn’s arm and broke the silence.
“I’ll tell you what this has to do with,” Claire said, her voice level and almost chillingly controlled. “My roommate was murdered on Friday night. Her blood was drained, and her head was torn off.” Josalyn twitched violently, but Claire retained her grip. “I saw who she was with earlier that night. Not too well, really … we were in a bar, and it was packed in there … but I definitely caught a glimpse of him.”
“And when she described him to me,” Danny added, “it sounded just like this guy I’d seen hanging around with Stephen.”
“Omigod,” Josalyn whispered, sagging back into her seat, her face bleaching out from the inside. “Omigod, omigod …”
“And then I remembered,” Danny concluded, “that Stephen was looking for him on the day after those murders in the subway.”
“That was the day you called me up,” Josalyn said, the words slow and ponderous, turning to stare at Stephen with numb, disbelieving eyes. “You said he disappeared, and … and that you thought he was dead …”
“WHAT?” Joseph roared, slamming his fists against the table. Stephen practically flew out of his chair. “You little bastard! You didn’t tell me!” He reached for Stephen’s collar and missed by an inch.
Stephen slid his chair back a foot from the table before he even knew he’d moved. Ian grabbed onto Joseph’s arm and tried to drag it back, nearly upsetting both of their pitchers. “Hey!” Joseph yelled, yanking violently free. They stared at each other, red-eyed and panting, for a long, dangerous second.
Then Stephen bolted from his seat and started to walk across the room.
“Hey!” Joseph repeated. He started to pull himself up from the bench; and for a second time, Ian grabbed him by the arm.
“Let me try to get him,” Ian said. The anger had drained from his face. “He isn’t scared half to death of me. Yet.” Then he flashed a crafty, knowing grin, waited for Joseph to acknowledge it, and took off after Stephen.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Allan murmured. The rest of them were speechless. Joseph reached for his pitcher and sullenly refilled his glass, draining it at a gulp. Then he filled it up again and set it down, staring defiantly around the table.
Suddenly, Josalyn started to giggle. Her hands curled up into little limp fists. She brought them up daintily and held them to her lips, as if they could hold the laughter in. Her eyes were glassy and remote and unreal, like two polished buttons on the face of a doll. When she spoke, her voice was squeaky as a rubber squeeze toy.
“So Rudy is … a vampire, huh?” A high-pitched titter escaped her, and a tear rolled down one cheek. “Oh, that’s great. That’s just fantastic. I … I can’t believe all the fun we’re having!”
The laughter got louder, more hysterical. Joseph looked at his hands, wondering if he should slap her. He decided against it, and emptied his glass instead.
“So where were you plannin’ on goin’, man?” Ian had caught up with Stephen in the doorway and taken him gently by the shoulder from behind.
“Leave me alone,” Stephen practically whimpered, feebly trying to pull away. I see what Joseph meant about this kid being a wimp, Ian thought, but he kept it to himself.
“Look. You’re the one who got us all together, right?” Stephen nodded hesitantly. “Well, you don’t wanna run out on your own party, do ya?” Stephen shot him a sidelong glance that was crawling with terror.
“Yeah, Joseph’s a scary guy, all right.” Ian put as much empathy in his voice as he could muster. “But he’s been through a lot lately … you wouldn’t believe how much … and he doesn’t really want to hurt you. He just wants to get at this Rudy character, you know?”
Stephen started to say something, then clammed up again. He looked like somebody’d dipped his nuts in a hot bowl of soup.
“Aw, come on,” Ian urged. “Say it. I don’t want to beat you up or anything. I just want to hear what you have to say. That’s all anybody wants. It seems like you know more about Rudy than anybody else; and I, for one, would be much obliged if you’d share some of the knowledge with us.”
Stephen finally looked away from his feet and brought his gaze up to meet Ian’s. The tears were just biding their time behind the eyelids, ready to roll at any moment. But behind the fear and the sadness … it was obvious to Ian that both were a factor here … there was also a dawning element of trust. Stephen had seen who grabbed Joseph’s arm in the nick of time; and he knew who Joseph would listen to, if anyone.
“You won’t let him punch me out?” Stephen asked. It was almost a plea.
“Not a chance,” Ian said, and hoped to God that it was true.
Slowly, Stephen let Ian lead him back to the table. Neither
one of them noticed the figure that watched, with keen interest, from the street.
Allan was not happy. He was not happy when he came in, he’d become slightly less happy when Josalyn had first broken down in tears, and he had been getting less and less happy ever since.
In fact, the only thing that could have cheered Allan up would have been a telegram from God, informing him that the last several days had been a bad dream, and that he’d be waking up shortly. That, or the sudden admission by everyone present that the whole thing had been an elaborate gag, a practical joke with a punch line so boffo that it took a week of misery to build up to.
As it stood, he saw neither option looming up on the horizon. Instead, he found himself surrounded by people who had either blown a fuse or tiptoed into the Twilight Zone. Either way, it sucked the imperial whanger.
And the worst of it was, Joseph and Ian were right square in the middle of it. No way were they going to back off now. Not when they’d stumbled onto so much affirmation. Christ, he thought, decidedly unhappy, I couldn’t restrain them now with twenty feet of chain and a ten-ton weight.
A damp and clammy silence had fallen over the table, sporadically broken by tiny sounds from Josalyn. She seemed to be alternating between sighs, sobs, and giggles at this point. Her head was in her hands, and she was shaking it a lot.
Joseph sullenly nursed his beer. He kept glancing in the direction that Stephen and Ian disappeared from, then back down at his hands. When he felt Allan’s gaze upon him, he looked over for a moment; and Allan thought that he saw a trace of apology there, mixed in with the customary impatience and rage. Then Joseph looked away again.
As for the other two: Danny and Claire were staring off into space, no particular expressions on their faces at all. They were obviously uncomfortable. And who wouldn’t be, Allan observed, sitting at a table where someone is losing her mind?
He took a pinch of Captain Black from its pouch, tamped it into his pipe with fingers that felt numb and weighted with lead. Everything about the place … the dim light, the dark wood, the ghostly strains of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper” wafting over from the jukebox … seemed calculated to feed the atmosphere of gloom that enveloped them.
Suddenly, Joseph leaned forward slightly, and his eyes brightened. Allan turned to look; a moment later, Stephen was sitting down beside him. Ian followed, beaming; he flashed a look at Joseph that said be cool, man. Don’t start. Joseph nodded almost imperceptibly, and Ian slid back into his seat.
“Okay,” Ian said. “So where were we?”
“We were talking,” Josalyn offered in a remarkably steady voice, “about Rudy being a vampire, right? We were suggesting that he’s the one who’s been killing all these people.” She paused to take a first tentative sip of her wine. The glass shook in her hand. The effort behind her control was evident.
“Well, I think it’s true,” she continued. “Now that you’ve brought it up, I think that it’s got to be true. Rudy’s either a vampire or something like it. He’s some kind of monster. He’s got to be. Otherwise, he couldn’t have done … what he did …
“To me.” The words were almost an afterthought. She had been trailing off there at the end, sinking toward inaudibility. Now her voice came back, more powerful than before. “Do you know what that fucker has done to me?” she asked. “Do you know why I’m sitting here, freaking out like this?”
A shaking of heads, grimly urging her on. She sipped again at her wine, then obliged.
“I’ve been having dreams, for the last few nights. Terrible dreams: the worst I’ve ever had. I don’t remember the first one too well, except that something came out of the grave for me …”
A discernible shiver ran through the group.
“… but the last two nights, I remember. I remember them very well.” Her face tightened into a vengeful, furious grin. Her eyes pointed down at the white knuckles of her delicate, fisted hands. The others were keyed in tightly, gauging her every word and gesture.
“For the last two nights, I’ve been raped and murdered in my sleep,” she said. Claire, in particular, jerked in reaction. “I’ve been put through Hell, in dreams so vivid that I woke up screaming. And my cat … my cat …” She would not let herself cry. She would not allow it. She stiffened, shaking her head in a rapid, staccato pattern, and quickly changed the subject.
“Anyway … last night, I finally saw his face. Just for a second, just before I woke up, but the picture was very clear in my mind.
“It was …”
“Well, well, well!” a new voice interjected, and a cold hand pressed its weight on Stephen’s shoulder. “What do we have here? A party?”
They looked up, startled. Josalyn froze; her pupils contracted to the size of pinpricks in a face gone suddenly paler than the bloodshot whites of her eyes. Her features slackened. Her eyes rolled up and out of commission. She teetered for a moment in her seat, then slumped against the wall in a dead faint. Nobody noticed.
They were all staring up, in varying degrees of terror and awe, at Rudy Pasko.
To Ian and Allan, the sight of Rudy set off a pair of diametrically opposed reactions. Whereas Allan found all of his skepticism dashed in a single second … logic be damned, he knew now that it was true … Ian took one look at that pallid, grinning countenance and said to himself, Is that all there is to him?
To Joseph, Rudy’s presence made his hackles rise. It’s the kind of fright you get when somebody steps out of the shadows behind you: a fleeting terror, but a total one in the moment that it strikes. Even more than Stephen, he could smell the death in the air.
To Danny, it was the kind of awe he’d have expected to feel if he were suddenly sucked into one of his movie posters: the sense of stepping concretely into the realm of the impossible, both feet on the ground and head suspended at a dizzying height.
To Claire, Rudy looked even more gorgeous than he had at the bar.
Stephen seemed to be shrinking under the weight of that cold hand, those luminous eyes. His face was pale, as pale as Rudy’s. The vampire grinned down at him in a mocking kind of palsy-walsy manner, and Stephen almost swallowed his tongue.
“What’s the matter, Stephen?” Rudy asked him, feigning genuine concern. “I thought you’d be glad to see me! Umm … aren’t you going to introduce me to all your nice new friends?” Stephen just stared at him, the color of Wonder Bread.
Joseph began to rise from his seat. Ian felt it coming the instant before it happened. Instinctively, the smaller man pushed his chair around so that he was facing Rudy. One leg kicked out to the right, tripping Joseph before the big man could get an inch from his seat. Joseph sat back down hard, whoofing slightly. Ian put his hand on Joseph’s arm, pinning it lightly to the table, his eyes never leaving Rudy’s face.
“So you’re Rudy, huh?” he said. “I’ve been hearing a lot about you.”
Rudy glanced over at Ian, then to Stephen, then back again. His face, which had contorted in anger for a moment, twisted itself into a calculating smile. “So you’ve been talking about me, have you, Stephen? I thought you might. How rude of you.” His eyes engaged Ian’s for a long crackling moment. Ian didn’t even flinch. “And your name was …”
“It still is. Ian.” An extended hand. A smile as phony as Rudy’s own. “Pleased ta meetcha.”
Rudy stared at the hand for a moment, perplexed. Who the hell does this guy think he is? Rudy wondered, unaware that Ian was thinking exactly the same thing. He regarded the hand for a moment longer, considered taking it, then dismissed the gesture entirely. “And what has our friend told you about me?”
“He hasn’t told us jack shit,” Joseph cut in angrily. He didn’t like the idea of being restrained, not even by his best friend, for all the right reasons. “We had to find out for ourselves.”
“Oh?” Rudy turned his attention to Joseph now, regarding him coolly. “And just what did you find?”
“Oh, nothing,” Ian interjected. “Nothing you don’t
already know about, I’m sure. Just little mundane things, really.” He smiled sweetly, condescendingly. He was feeling the fight build up inside him, like steam in a pressure cooker, and loving every minute of it. “Nothing very interesting at all.”
Rudy didn’t like that. Like a slap in the face, it knocked him off balance for a moment and made him come back pissed. He glowered at Ian, no trace of a smile on his face as he hissed, “You’re a smart little shit, aren’t you?”
Ian leaned forward in his seat, grinning wickedly. “That’s me,” he said, nodding. “Got that right on the nose. Coming from a squirmy little worm-faced fuck, that’s awfully darned astute.”
“What?” Rudy’s face reddened slightly. A burst of helpless laughter swept the table, and Rudy once again said, “What?”
“Hey! I thought you had X-ray hearing!” Ian griped. His smile was almost big enough to park Joseph’s van in. “What about all those amazing powers we thought you were supposed to have? Don’t tell me it isn’t true! I couldn’t bear to hear it!” He put his hands over his ears and winced comically, eyes bulging.
Rudy was stunned. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The audacity of this human exceeded all bounds. He felt like taking this Ian’s face and grinding it into the ceiling. “You’re going to be sorry …” he began.
“Oh, I already am!” Ian’s own ferocity had reached its head and boiled over. “Believe me. When I heard about the big bad monster that rapes and kills women, I got this mental picture of somebody who was really impressive, ya know? And here I find that I got all worked up over nothin’! It’s a big disappointment, let me tell ya.”
At that moment, Josalyn started to come around. Her mouth opened, a low moan escaping. All eyes turned toward her. For the first time, they noticed her unconsciousness. Terror blossomed in Ian’s heart like a mushroom cloud. Rudy smiled like the man who found Achilles’ heel.
“You like her.” A mocking pronouncement. “The high-buttoned bitch attracts you, I gather. Well, let me warn you: she likes men without backbones. She likes toadies that she can domineer …”
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