SHADOWS

by Jonathan Nasaw

  With his eyes still carefully closed, Whistler sniffed the air. It smelled like dusk, but Martha's room had Venetian blinds, which were considered notoriously unreliable in vampire circles, and he didn't want any nasty sunbeams sneaking up on him. He tried a quick peek through slitted eyelids—no pain. He opened them the rest of the way, and saw that the light stealing in through the slits and around the edges of the blinds was violet-gray and fading.

  Whistler sat up, turning his head gingerly this way and that, his neck snap-crackle-and-popping like a bowl of Rice Krispies. "Oh man, could I use a drink," he said aloud, throwing back the comforter and stepping out of bed; that's when he saw the note taped to the inside of the door. Purple marker on loose-leaf paper:

  J.—Left you a waker-upper in the fridge. Enjoy! By the time you're awake my body will be in the loft. Please watch it for me until I get back. All my love, S.

  Whistler hopped into his jeans on his way out the bedroom door. He fully intended to dash up the ladder to the loft first; he would have, too, if Martha's bedroom door hadn't opened out directly onto the kitchen only a few feet from the refrigerator. Besides, he told himself as he opened the door to the old Kenmore and removed a small silver creamer, whatever the hell was going on in the loft, he'd be better able to deal with it on blood.

  He took a sip from the creamer. This was a moment he'd sworn to himself years ago he'd never take for granted, this first blood of the evening; even now, with no time to spare, he took an instant to appreciate the grateful shudder with which his body received its gift. Then he climbed the ladder to the loft and found Selene lying naked on her back under the skylight, her hands folded peacefully across her breast.

  But as he approached he saw that the tendrils of her wild gray hair were damp and tangled and the thin bare mattress under her was drenched with sweat. If she was breathing, he couldn't detect it: no perceptible rise and fall to that pale chest, not even when he was kneeling at her side. But her skin was neither cold, nor blue, nor waxen like a corpse. Suddenly it all came together for him: Selene's tale of her first belladonna flight on Halloween; last night's "Wouldn't it be easier if we knew where Len was keeping Martha?"; her note; this body in suspended animation.

  The blood hadn't hit him yet—cold blood took a little longer to come on. He checked his watch, the same Patek Philippe he'd stolen from his father so many years before. Quarter after five. An hour and a quarter until Len's phone call. He found himself wondering whether Selene had remembered to take care of the call forwarding. He had a moment of panic, but then, concurrently with the onset of the blood rush, a plan came to him. He found a blanket folded up against the wall and spread it over Selene, then returned to Martha's room and called Selene's number from Martha's white Princess-style phone; after three rings the phone in the front room, Don's line, began ringing, and did not stop until he'd hung up the bedroom phone.

  Reassured, Jamey prowled around the A-frame checking out the bureaus and closets, and found clean socks, a pair of Ben Davis jeans that would be long enough for him, if a bit loose, a studded belt with a Harley buckle, and a Winged Rider Harley T-shirt. He chanced a quick shower, towel-dried and finger-combed his short white hair. When he checked himself out in the mirror behind Martha's door he saw that somehow he had managed to look nothing like a biker, despite all the paraphernalia.

  Whistler made a few more trips up and down the ladder, hauling cushions from the couch in the front room, and a can of Colt 45 and a box of Snak Mix, then unhooking Don's phone and plugging it into a jack in the loft. He checked his watch as he settled down beside Selene's inert body: five forty-five. He took a deep breath and felt the blood rush spreading outward from the very marrow of his bones. The Creature stirred.

  "Oh shut up," he told it. "Haven't you gotten us into enough trouble already?" He tried to remember that night with Moll seventeen or eighteen years ago. The Broadway house. Moll was there, Selene was off somewhere… Moll was carving runestones… cut her finger… Oh Jamey … ? Showing him the blood beading up on her fingertip… No sense letting it go to waste…

  Whistler shook his head wonderingly, appreciatively. One minute you're sucking on a finger, next thing you know it's the nineties and you've got a teenage daughter. Had Martha inherited his blood-drinking genes, he wondered? Cora had not.

  The Creature, which had been thrusting its head impatiently against the rough denim of the work jeans in memory of Moll's glorious bod, retreated at the thought of Cora. Whistler lay back against the cushions. Time to do the Tighten Up again.

  Selene's hearing was the first thing to return, even before her consciousness of self. That was a particularly weird sensation: hearing a humming noise before she knew what hearing was. Or humming, or noise, for that matter, much less who was doing the hearing.

  Jamey was beside her. It was his voice she had heard, humming an old Grateful Dead tune. When she spoke her own voice seemed equally distant: "Before I forget. Three falling-down shacks in a level clearing on a hillside. Knee-high grass around the shacks. A grove of cypress trees above the clearing, a ravine behind it. They're in the third shack, the one nearest the ravine. Martha was hogtied and gagged; Aldo was in a sleeping bag."

  Selene sat up. She was shaky, and slightly feverish, but not nearly as confused or debilitated as she'd been after her last trip with the Fair Lady. Whistler steadied her from behind. She shivered; he tucked the blanket around her. "She was so frightened, Jamey. She's seen her own death and she was so frightened."

  "Anything else—anything that might tell us where this hill is?"

  Selene leaned back against him, trying to conjure up more memories. She shook her head. "Nothing's coming up. What time is it?"

  "Just turned six." He felt her forehead. "You're still a little warm."

  "I know. I'm going to go hunt up some aspirin to bring the fever down, then take a cold shower."

  Jamey handed her Martha's Laura Ashley from beside the mattress, helped her pull it on, helped her to her feet. "You still look a tad shaky—here, let me spot you." He started down the ladder, waited for her halfway.

  Selene made the descent easily enough with Jamey's arms around her from behind, not touching her but somehow steadying her nonetheless. At least this time the ladder isn't on fire, she thought.

  CHAPTER 4

  « ^ »

  Aldo awoke at sunset on Wednesday night and enjoyed a swig of cold blood from the last jar in the cooler before unwinding the bandages from his right hand. The wounds were healing up nicely around the tiny black threads. There would be scars, he recognized, but other than that he'd been lucky—no nerves or tendons had been severed.

  He rewound the gauze, then turned on his side to check out the girl. She was still asleep—or at least her eyes were closed—but she had wet herself overnight. Aldo's nose wrinkled up—the smell of cold piss always reminded him of the Orfelinat. He climbed out of his sleeping bag and went outside to relieve himself in the tall grass, then returned and scooped Martha up in his arms, leaning back from the odor of stale urine.

  "Lucky thing I didn't feed you last night, you'd have shit yourself like poor Nick."

  But her eyes, open now, were dull with stupor above the gag. Aldo hadn't participated in too many long-term kidnappings during his career (for some reason he was not the man his superiors would choose when the program called for keeping a subject alive for an extended period of time), but as far as he could tell the girl was currently in the surrender stage of victimhood. Which didn't mean you didn't have to watch them just as carefully, or confine them just as securely as in the more active stages, Aldo reminded himself as he slung the girl over his left shoulder, but there was also another problem to deal with—they had a tendency to die on you so very easily at this stage.

  As he carried her out of the third shack, then up the two makeshift cinderblock-and-plank steps of the middle cabin, he tried to decide whether it mattered to him whether she died or not. Probably not, he concluded; still he would play it conse
rvatively until he had drawn Whistler and the witch all the way into his trap. Better to have her alive and not need her than need her alive and not have her.

  The floorboards in the middle shack were rotten-soft. With the girl in his arms, her pale eyes open and fixed on his face, Aldo followed the straight line of nail heads that marked one of the support beams, placing one foot carefully in front of the other in the dark until he'd reached the far wall. He set his burden down against the wall and began lifting out floorboards with his good hand, taking care to keep them level as he set them aside so that the dust and dirt didn't slide off. Fortunately she was a slender little thing. She fit into the long narrow space between the exposed beams with only a little cramming, and as he began to replace the boards he saw that there would even be a clearance of an inch or more between her chest and the underside of the rotten flooring. She would be able to breathe as long as she wanted to.

  Of course, how long she'd want to keep breathing was problematical. Her eyes had gone round and soft in the dark; they were still looking up at him, but with surprisingly little reproach, as he painstakingly fit the last board into place over her face. It was a look he was more accustomed to seeing in the eyes of torture victims at the end of a long hard night, a look that meant that there wasn't much point going on with the torture—other than the sheer fun of it, of course.

  Then he remembered that he'd decided to keep her alive. "I just have to make a phone call, pick up some supplies," he said loudly, while tightroping his way back along the trail of nail heads. "Be back in an hour or so and we'll get you out of there and cleaned up."

  There, that should give her a reason to keep breathing for a while, without filling her with too much hope. Aldo didn't want her hopeful, just alive. He paused in the doorless doorway, remembering something William Honey had told him over the phone that morning.

  "Two secrets to success in my profession, Len," the realtor had explained. "Location and timing."

  Mine too, thought Aldo, looking over what to all appearances was one of three empty, humble, tear-down shacks on a half-million-dollar distressed property halfway between Carmel and Big Sur. Mine too.

  * * *

  Martha watched the coffin lid closing over her and thought about all the things she'd never done. Never had a baby was the first thing that came to mind. She tried to imagine it, a life growing inside her. Must really be something. If she had a baby she'd strap it on like those Amazon Indian women do, carry it around with her all day and sleep next to it at night and nurse it whenever it was hungry…

  She closed her eyes, tried to let that fantasy carry her off to sleep. But she'd slept so much lately, every time she dozed off she'd snap awake within minutes, and if she'd been asleep long enough to forget where she was—the motel, the trunk of the car, the other cabin last night—then the waking would be twice as painful.

  As for how it would feel to wake up in your coffin? Oh Goddess oh Goddess oh Goddess oh Goddess oh Goddess…

  * * *

  The first thing Aldo needed was more ice for the cooler. The Clamato juice jars were all empty, but with any luck he'd be refilling them again within a few hours. He drove north on Highway 1 to the shopping center he'd seen on the way down, and purchased several bags of ice at the supermarket, along with a ready-cooked barbecued chicken, a pint of potato salad, and a two-liter Pepsi. He also bought a clever plastic tub of pop-up Wash'n Dri's. He'd somewhat lost his taste for Martha, all dull and dirty, but perhaps after a good washing up… ? Be a shame to waste her entirely.

  He made his phone calls from a booth near the supermarket entrance. After checking with the Monterey Marriot to be sure they had plenty of vacancies (it was a Tuesday night during offseason), he dialed Selene's number and tried not to sound surprised when she answered, though he hadn't been at all sure she'd be there. "Why hello there! Is this Selene?"

  "Aldo? Is Martha there? Let me speak to her."

  "Nice to finally speak to you, too. No, she's not with me. But she's safe. And by the way, I'll be making the demands from here on out. Is Whistler there?" Yes.

  "Excellent. Here's your next assignment…"

  * * *

  As he approached the Carmel Highlands on his way back down the coast, Aldo set his cheap but reliable Casio to the stopwatch function. At the red-painted phone booth in front of the quaint little Mission-style gas station he clicked the start button with his thumb, and set the cruise control on the Toyota at fifty-five. He then selected a CD at random from the kit bag (couldn't go too wrong—they were all Callas), struggled with, but eventually managed to open, the case—talk about things that were difficult to do with one hand—slipped it into the slot without looking, and pushed the random button, a gesture of faith that was rewarded immediately by "Divinites du Styx" from Alceste.

  Soaring horns, soaring voice—a fitting sound track for the wild coastal scenery. In places the highway seemed to have been hacked out of the side of sheer cliffs: to the left, above the road, majestic windblown pines and cypresses rose from bluffs and crags; to the right, far below, black surf battered itself into ghost-white foam against the rocks.

  Aldo clicked the stopwatch again as he turned onto the dirt road immediately after the sign for the defunct Westmere rest home. Seventeen minutes at legal speed. He ran through the timing again: drive to the phone booth, make the call to the Marriott around eleven—Whistler and Selene would have had more than enough time to get to Monterey from Bolinas and check in—then drive back, arriving no later than 11:20, which would give him plenty of time to set up his ambush.

  Timing: check. Location: check. Aldo held the bottle of Clamato juice between his knees while he unscrewed the cap, then drank a toast to William Honey.

  * * *

  Martha felt the floor shaking overhead; her eyes were sufficiently used to the dark by then that when Len lifted the boards away she could see his silhouette kneeling above her, and beyond that she could even make out a few bright stars through the holes in the roof of the shack.

  She wasn't sure how she felt about being lifted out of her coffin. In a way it had been sort of a peaceful feeling, saying good-bye to her friends, forgiving her mom for leaving her and Selene for lying to her. And after the pain in her bound limbs had faded from sharp stabbing to a dull ache, from a dull ache to pins and needles, and from pins and needles to a dead absent sensation, it was not even a particularly uncomfortable experience, this waiting to die.

  Then Len lifted her into the air and all the peace went rushing out of her. She closed her eyes against the sudden dizziness as he carried her out of the shack, felt her belly muscles clenching, tasted bile; she could feel it climbing her throat, filling her mouth, splashing against the inside of the duct tape gag. She tried desperately to swallow the vomit, but she couldn't force it back down again with her mouth taped shut: soon she was choking on the bitter stuff.

  No, she thought, before the drowning sensation overtook her. No, not like this.

  CHAPTER 3

  « ^ »

  Low in the west Venus was a silver splash above the shallow ivory cup of the new moon. To the north and east, across the great crescent sweep of Monterey Bay, a luminous gray band softened the sky over the scalloped black ridge of the horizon; above the gray the stars were having themselves a high old time.

  "Twinkle on, you bastards," muttered Jamey Whistler, pacing the balcony of the topmost corner suite at the Marriott. Selene was inside, sitting on the pink-and-cream-striped loveseat under an enormous print of a pastel-pink vulviform flower—Georgia Faux'Keefe—within arm's reach of the telephone. When it finally rang, just before eleven, she jumped as if someone had fired a starter's pistol, nearly spilling a glass of ice water down her good luck red-on-black "Surrender Dorothy" T-shirt.

  "Yes?"

  "Both there?"

  Selene looked up as Jamey raced by on his way to pick up the extension in the bedroom. "Just a sec."

  "Go on," said Jamey breathlessly into the phone.

&nb
sp; "Strigoi and striga reunited at last. How lovely for you. Pencil and paper?"

  "Just a sec." Selene picked up the Marriott notepad and ballpoint from the coffee table. "Go ahead."

  "The two of you are to leave your hotel at precisely eleven-thirty. I don't have to tell you what will happen to Martha should you attempt to leave early, or should anyone else accompany you, or even just happen to show up coincidentally. You are to proceed south on Highway 1. Approximately fourteen miles south of Carmel you'll pass a sign for the Westmere. Slow down. I want Selene behind the wheel. Take the first left after the Westmere sign. Kill your lights, drive a hundred meters or so up the hill until you come to a cattle gate. Whistler, I want you to step out and open the gate while she drives through, then close it behind her and wait just inside the gate with your hands behind your head. Selene, once through you are to stop the car just inside the gate, turn off the motor and headlights, step out of the vehicle, open the trunk and all the doors, leaving the dome light on, then step away from the car and stand by the gate next to your strigoi with your hands behind your head. Still with me?"

  "Yes of course," said Whistler.

  "Yissuvcawss." Aldo mocked his plummy Oxbridge accent. "It is now ten-forty-seven. I shall expect you between midnight at the earliest and twelve-fifteen at the latest. Got all that?"

  "Got it," said Selene. "What happens next?"