by Ray Garton
Buffy closed her eyes. The sound of rainfall outside was soothing, comforting. In spite of the lump in her hungry stomach, Buffy felt herself gliding down toward sleep almost immediately. It was the slippery sliding feeling that always came just before she lost all awareness of the room around her and the bed she was in, just before sleep embraced her and carried her off . . . to dreams or nightmares, or that one particular nightmare . . .
Something jarred her out of her almost-sleep. Buffy opened her eyes and lifted her head slightly from the pillow. She heard nothing. The bedroom’s doors and windows were locked, the whole house was sealed up tight. She was as safe as she could be, given the nature of what she was, and there was no reason not to sleep.
Her eyes closed again and her head settled back on the pillow.
The bed moved.
Buffy’s eyes snapped open wide and all thoughts of sleep disappeared. She rolled onto her back and sat up halfway, propped up by both arms with locked elbows.
She felt movement beneath her. Under the bed.
A shiver passed through Buffy as realization flooded her mind. While she was going through the house locking all the doors and windows, and while she was locking the door and windows in her bedroom, the Rakshasa had already arrived and were waiting for her under the bed.
Buffy thought fast. The wooden stake had taken too long to finally kill the two creatures in the library. She guessed there were several of them huddling under the bed. A sharp knife would do much more damage in less time.
She turned her head slowly to look over at her dresser. There was a knife with a very sharp nine-inch blade in her equipment drawer.
Something moved under her bed again. Just slightly.
Buffy carefully peeled the covers back and turned on the bed so she was facing the dresser. She took in a deep breath, let it out slowly, then jumped off the bed to dive toward the dresser.
The second her feet hit the floor, a rough-skinned, clammy hand jabbed out from under the bed and grabbed her left ankle in an iron grip.
Chapter 16
THE BEDROOM FLOOR SWEPT UPWARD IN A BLUR AND slammed into Buffy. A second hand clutched her right ankle, and this time, she felt sharp claws press against her skin, coming very close to breaking it. The creature began to pull on Buffy’s legs to drag her under the bed. Its clawed hands had a powerful grip, and in spite of its small size, the creature was very strong.
Buffy clutched at the carpet and tried to pull herself forward, but without something to get a firm hold on, she could not do it. Instead, she rolled over onto her back and sat up. The creature was beneath her legs suddenly, caught off guard, and its grip loosened. She spread her knees, grabbed the creature’s ears, and pulled its head up between her thighs, then closed her legs on its neck.
The creature made a strangled gurgle and began to struggle.
The bed jostled as the other creatures beneath it scrambled to get out.
Buffy reached up, took a pen from her desk, and stabbed it into the creature’s right eye, then the left. The Rakshasa released a horrible mewling cry of pain, but she did not stop. She stabbed the creature’s face and neck repeatedly, holding the head by the left ear to keep it as still as she could. The familiar yellowish-green slime splashed onto her legs and hand until the creature collapsed into a viscous mass. As Buffy got to her feet, the thick substance evaporated instantly.
More small, clawed hands swept out from under the bed, reaching for Buffy’s feet but grasping only air. A reptilian snout appeared as one crawled out from under the bed, then another.
Buffy opened her dresser drawer, snatched up the knife, and spun around to face the Rakshasa.
Four had come out and were getting to their feet, with a fifth right behind them.
“Buffy?” her mother called out in the hall. “Buffy, what’s wrong?” The doorknob rattled, but the locked door didn’t open. “Buffy, open this door!”
“Hang on, Mom, I’ll be with you in a sec.” She turned to the drawer again and dropped the knife back in before rustling around for something else. She took out a small machete and removed the leather scabbard. “Okay,” she said as she faced them again, all five now, “batter up.” Holding the machete like a baseball bat, she stepped foward and swung low.
Her first strike lopped the head off the closest Rakshasa. The head thunked to the floor as the body dropped and convulsed. Both melted away in seconds.
Buffy swung the machete low and indiscriminately. She felt the impact of the blade on the creatures with each swing, but wasn’t sure what kind of damage she was doing; her eyes squinted and sometimes even closed against the splash and spatter of warm viscous fluids that came from the wounded creatures. Their cries of pain blended into one single shrieking squeal.
“Buffy!” Joyce screamed outside the bedroom. She pounded on the door frantically. “What’s happening? What’s going on?”
“Hang on, Mom!”
One of the creatures latched on to her leg and tried to climb up her body. Buffy bent down and grabbed the pink, fleshy tail with her left hand and jerked the Rakshasa off her leg. She lifted her arm high and let the creature dangle for a second, then swung the machete hard. It cut through the creature diagonally, and the top half of the body dropped to the floor with a thunk.
The room fell silent. Buffy looked around but only saw yellowish-green goo evaporating rapidly on the floor, bed, nightstand, and wall.
“Buffy, open this door!” There was more anger than fear in Joyce’s voice this time.
Buffy unlocked and opened the bedroom door. Joyce was in a nightgown, hair splayed, eyes puffy. She put a hand on each side of the doorway and leaned into the room, looked around cautiously, settled her eyes on the machete in Buffy’s hand for a moment. When she looked at Buffy, it was with an expression that said she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what had just happened. She embraced Buffy and said, “My God, what was all that noise, what was happening in here?”
“I’m fine, Mom.” The yellowish-green substance was gone, leaving no sign it had ever been anywhere in the room or on Buffy.
Joyce pulled back with her hands on Buffy’s shoulders. “I’m fine, Mom? That answers neither of my questions, Buffy. And why do you have that —” Her attention was caught by something behind Buffy. Her eyes widened, and she stumbled backward as she screamed.
With her heart still hammering from her experience just ended, Buffy turned, ready for anything.
One last Rakshasa had just crawled from under the bed and was running toward her on stubby legs. Buffy bent her knees and leveled the machete’s blade with the creature’s abdomen an instant before it reached her. The Rakshasa’s eyes widened as it realized it was running too fast . . . and it impaled itself on the sharp blade.
Buffy clutched the machete’s handle with both hands, raised it over her head with the small creature still skewered on the blade, and brought it down hard like a club. The creature’s feet hit the floor first, and the machete cut downward, coming out between its legs to hit the carpet. A second after the Rakshasa’s life fluids began to gush from the deep wound, it decayed swiftly, spreading in a puddle. A moment later, it too was gone.
“Good Lord, Buffy, what was that?” Unspilled tears glistened in Joyce’s eyes and her face was drained of color.
“C’mon, Mom, let’s get out of here.” Buffy set the machete on top of her dresser, then put a hand on Joyce’s shoulder, gently turned her around, and eased her out into the hall, then pulled the bedroom door closed. “Now, wait right here, I’ll be back in a second.”
“B-but what are you —”
“Just a second.” Buffy went into her mother’s bedroom and checked under the bed and in the closet. She made sure the windows were locked, then went back into the hall, still unsure of how much to tell her mother of her ugly, disturbing story. She smiled and said, “Okay, Mom, you can go back to bed if you want.”
“Back to bed?” Joyce put her hands on her hips. “Buffy, with the sounds I heard coming
out of your room, it’s a wonder I didn’t wet my bed.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. That won’t happen again.”
“At the risk of sounding glib, did you bring your work home with you tonight?”
Buffy closed her eyes and nodded. “Yes, a Slayerrelated problem that came in under the radar. But it’s all gone now.”
Joyce’s eyes widened as she frowned and gently touched Buffy’s forehead. “Where did you get that bump?” she asked breathily.
“Oh, that. I fell. In the library. Hit a chair.”
“Mmm, well . . .” Her arm dropped to her side, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly through puffed cheeks. “There’s no way I can sleep,” Joyce said with a sigh. “My heart feels like a disco band.”
Laughter blurted unexpectedly from Buffy, surprising even herself. “Hey, that’s a good one, Mom.”
Joyce leaned against the wall. “Yeah, well, I show signs of wit every now and then.” Her hand moved down to her stomach. “Fear makes me hungry. I’m starving.”
Hunger was grumbling in Buffy’s stomach as well, even louder than when she had gone to bed. She nodded and said, “Me, too. I didn’t have any dinner.”
“Would you like me to fix you something?”
“No, that’s okay. I’ll just —”
“Don’t be silly. I’ll put on my robe and . . .” She frowned a moment, thinking. “No, wait, I’ve got a better idea. Let’s go out.”
“To eat? Do you know what time it is?”
“We can go to Denny’s and have a nice breakfast.” Joyce grinned as she playfully poked Buffy in the ribs. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”
“I have to go to school tomorrow.”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but there’s no way I’ll be getting back to sleep for a while.”
Buffy looked back at her room and nodded slowly. “Yeah . . . me, neither.”
“Let’s put our clothes on before we start feeling tired again and change our minds.”
Buffy changed into overalls and a sweatshirt. While her mother was still changing, she went to the phone. She had to call Willow and warn her.
Denny’s was busier than Buffy had expected at that hour in a town as small as Sunnydale. She and her mom had a booth at the front window, looking out on the rainy street.
“Mmm, an omelet sounds good,” Joyce said, perusing the menu. “What are you going to have?”
Buffy frowned as she looked over the breakfast selections. “I don’t know. Maybe a muffin.”
“A muffin? For goodness’ sake, Buffy, you haven’t eaten since lunch. Have a real breakfast. Tell you what, I’ll order for you.”
“Sounds good. I’ll abdicate responsibility for my cholesterol and weight.” Buffy closed her menu and put it on the table.
Before leaving the house, she had called Willow and told her to get out of her bedroom and sleep on the couch or something, that the Rakshasa were under her bed. Willow had told her to hold on, then returned a couple minutes later and said she’d swung a yardstick back and forth under her bed and there was nothing there.
“Are you crazy?” Buffy had exclaimed. “They could have been there!”
“Well, they aren’t now.”
Buffy wondered if they had been warned somehow. Were the Rakshasa able to communicate with one another telepathically? It was possible. Once she had discovered their hiding place under her bed, maybe the creatures under Willow’s bed had been warned that the cat was out of the bag. Or maybe they’d sensed the deaths of the ones Buffy had killed and had decided not to take the same risk. Whatever the case, it was another detail she would have to pass on to Giles.
The waitress came and Joyce ordered a Denver omelet for herself, and eggs, two slices of bacon, two sausages, hash browns, and sourdough toast for Buffy. And hot chocolate for both of them.
“There’s no way I’m leaving this restaurant without having a stroke,” Buffy said, putting her face in her hands, elbows on the edge of the table.
“Oh, stop. It won’t kill you.”
“I guess not. Not tonight, anyway.”
“Now, are you ever going to tell me what happened in your room tonight, Buffy?”
“It’s a long story, Mom. Some . . . unsavory creatures were hiding under my bed, and I killed them.”
Joyce smiled. “You used to think that when you were a little girl. That there was some kind of monster under your bed. Do you remember?”
Buffy nodded, smirking. “I couldn’t sleep with the closet door open, either, because I thought the closet monster was watching me.” Buffy knew the longer she kept her mother off the subject of what had happened in her bedroom, the more likely she was to stay off the subject. “What’s up at the gallery these days?”
Joyce’s eyes widened. “You heard?”
Buffy frowned. “Heard what? I was just wondering.”
She released a long, weary sigh and closed her eyes for a moment. “The gallery has been closed all day. When we got there this morning, we found that someone had broken in and ransacked the place.”
Buffy’s mouth dropped open and she gasped. “Oh, no! What was stolen?”
“That’s the weird part. Nothing. The place was just trashed. We spent the whole day cleaning up, tallying our losses.”
“Do you know who did it?” Buffy asked. Before her mother could answer, she added, “What about that crazy woman? What’s her name?”
“Lovecraft, Phyllis Lovecraft.”
Buffy chided herself for not running the name by Giles, and made a note to do so the next time she saw him. She knew she’d heard the name before, and something told her it was either from, or in connection to, Giles.
“Yes, I’d thought of her,” Joyce continued. “But the others seemed convinced it was that strange man who’d come into the gallery the day before.”
Frowning, Buffy asked, “What strange man?”
“I don’t know who he was. He came in, looked around for a few minutes, said something to Beth, then left. But he was the center of attention while he was there.”
“Why? What was so strange about him?”
Joyce laughed quietly. “Everything.”
The waitress came with their food.
Buffy looked at the plate before her. “If I knew there was gonna be this much grease, I would’ve brought some Easy-Off.”
“Oh, stop it.”
“So, what about this man?”
“He was very tall. Six-five, I’d say. Maybe taller. He wore a black trenchcoat and a black wide-brimmed hat . . . the kind of hat the Shadow wore in that movie.”
“What movie?”
“The Shadow.”
Buffy shrugged and gestured for her to go on.
“Well, aside from being all black — even his pants and boots were black — his clothes really weren’t the strange part. He was white. Not white as in Caucasian, but white as in . . . well, flour. I don’t know about his hands because he wore gloves, but his face was white as a ghost.” She winced suddenly. “Oh, I suppose that was an unfair thing to say. I mean, you’d know better than I, but I imagine there are Asian ghosts and black ghosts and —”
“Mother.” Buffy closed her eyes so her mother couldn’t see her roll them. “I know what you mean. What about his eyes?”
“He was wearing black reflective sunglasses.”
The face in the limousine? Buffy wondered. She tried to remember if he’d been wearing a black wide-brimmed hat.
“But I saw a little of his hair,” Joyce said, frowning, “and believe it or not, it looked white, too. Platinum, maybe. I don’t know.”
“So you think he might have trashed the gallery?”
“I don’t think so, no. Why would he do something like that? Nothing at all was stolen, let alone anything of value. And he rode up to the gallery in a limousine.”
Buffy’s eyes widened. “A white limousine?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I’ve seen a white limo prowling around town recently.
Late at night. And one night I saw a very pale face wearing sunglasses looking out the back window.”
“Do you know who he is?”
Buffy shook her head.
“When I saw him get out of the limousine, I figured he had to be from out of town. Los Angeles, or maybe Santa Barbara.”
“Could be. Or maybe even farther than that.”
“Our breakfasts are getting cold,” Joyce said.
They began to eat and were silent for a few minutes, except for the sounds of their chewing and the utensils clacking gently against the plates.
“You know,” Buffy said, “even though I can actually feel my arteries hardening as I eat this . . . it’s way delicious.”
“See?” Joyce said with a smile.
After another minute of silent eating, Buffy asked, “Did the guy in the hat happen to ask about a statuette of some kind?”
“Statuette? No, not that I know of. Of course, Beth never told me what he said. Why? What statuette?”
Buffy shook her head as she took a bite of bacon. “It’s nothing.”
Joyce sighed, frustrated. “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Buffy. It’s not like I’m going to write down everything you tell me and fax it to the Los Angeles Times.” She continued eating her food and neither of them said anything for a while. Then: “Does it have something to do with those horrible killings?”
“Killings?” Buffy asked, looking up from her food. “What killings?”
“How could you not hear about them? They’re all over the news. Those two teachers at your school. The old man who killed his friend with the lawnmower, and then . . . well, what happened to him. And that woman who stabbed her friend before . . . well, it was the same thing as the old man. They were both eaten.”
“Oh, yeah. Those killings.” Buffy nodded slowly. “Yes. It is related to that. There’s something . . . well, new in town. Something we’ve never dealt with before. And it involves a statuette. I just wondered if the guy from the limo had something to do with it. Probably not.”
Joyce smiled. “See? Was that so hard?”
Buffy returned the smile and took a bite of toast.
“Distilled water,” Giles muttered to himself. He sat at his desk in his apartment, books open in front of him. But instead of reading the books, he was combing through the pages Willow had printed up from the Internet.
