The Longest Night Vol. 1

by Various

  Fred and Cordy followed his direction, and their mouths fell open in surprise. As they stepped off the last of the stairs, their feet—Cordelia’s in sneakers and Fred’s in slippers—sunk into two inches of slush.“What the heck?” Cordelia back-stepped and almost slipped. “How can it freeze up like this inside?”

  “Without the proper conditions, it can’t,” Fred said. “There’s a very specific threshold of moisture to temperature ratio that you have to cross, not to mention a whole bunch of other criteria.” She glanced up at the high ceiling and her expression grew even more amazed. “Look—almost all the pipes are covered in icicles!”

  “Where are the guys?” Cordelia asked. “I don’t see them.”

  The three of them peered into the basement, but the only thing visible was more ice and snow—the stuff blanketed everything, from boxes and old furniture to pieces and parts of unidentifiable objects. They couldn’t tell one thing from another.

  “The laundry room,” Angel said. “That’s where the furnace is. They would have headed there. Come on.”

  Fred drew in a breath, shivering at the chilliness of the air. “Gunn? Wesley?” No answer.

  “Okay,” Cordelia said, as she picked her way across the snow-covered floor. “I was never much into the whole skiing thing, you know? There are good reasons for choosing southern California.”

  “I thought your decision had more to do with the whole movie career aspect,” Angel said.

  “That, too.”

  “In here,” Angel said. “Gunn, Wesley—whoa!” He stopped short in the doorway, and Fred and Cordelia, both watching where they put their feet on the slippery floor rather than Angel’s back, bumped full tilt into him.

  “Hey,” Cordy protested. “Brake lights, please!”

  “What’s wrong?” Fred said. She tilted to the side until she could see around Angel’s shoulder. “Are they in there?”

  Instead of answering, Angel took a couple of steps farther into the low-ceilinged laundry room. The women followed, then stared at what awaited them.

  Wesley and Gunn were there, all right, standing as though paralyzed in the middle of the room, which itself had been transformed into a miniature winter wonderland. Snow layered everything like a thick white comforter, covering the industrial washers and dryers that lined one wall, piling up in a small mountain that came to within a foot of the front of the furnace that was still laboring in the back corner. The furnace’s efforts to keep up had only melted the snow building up along the pipes and clotheslines and caused it to flow into icicles that reached all the way from ceiling to floor like stalactites.

  “Wesley,” Angel said harshly. “Gunn—can you hear me?” He started to move forward, then realized that he couldn’t—the snow had immediately flowed into the space he’d created when he’d pushed open the door, circling behind him and around Fred and Cordelia. His feet were somehow pinned to the floor. They weren’t frozen or cold, but he couldn’t move them either. There was something else down here, too, back in the corner between the last of the oversize washing machines and the wide table that had been built there for laundry folding. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it was moving, and since the four things in this place besides him that were supposed to move—Wesley, Gunn, Cordelia, and Fred—were all accounted for, this was definitely not a good thing.

  The thing in the corner, bulky and ponderous, white like the rest of the room, shifted again, as though it were trying to pull itself forward and out. Angel tried to turn toward the women, but could only move his upper body; twisting as best he could, he looked back over his shoulder. “Cordy, you and Fred get back upstairs—”

  But it was way, way too late, and the gazes that stared back at him were as blank and empty as the whiteness that was quickly surrounding them all…

  Wesley thought he could still feel himself…more or less. He was cold, in a vague, this-is-happening-to-someone-else sort of way, and he knew he really ought to make himself move, get out of this frigid little basement room and find some heat.

  But it was all a matter of making that choice.

  And choices, he did have—right there in front of him. There was the option of forcing his slowly numbing limbs to work, or lingering, just for a bit longer, on the images that were playing out in his head.

  In a way, he knew that none of them were true. This was obvious because he could see himself in the images, and being what he considered a reasonably intelligent man, he knew that he would never be able to see himself doing anything unless he was looking directly into a mirror. It was just as obvious that this wasn’t the case, since he was watching a current version of himself talk and laugh with his parents—right there, only a few feet away, sat his mum and dad, smiles on their faces as they gathered in front of the yule log and his mother set out a beautiful Old English trifle, rich with Devonshire cream, almonds, strawberry jam, and more. They were in the front sitting room, and while Wesley remembered the room well from his childhood, this time it was different; the formerly dark and gloomy colors were brightly festooned with cheerful seasonal ribbons, and the traditional mince pies and Christmas crackers waited on the lovely mahogany sideboard. In the background, Wesley could even hear the muted sound of the Queen’s Christmas message, a sure sign that it was afternoon and Christmas dinner—roast goose, stuffing, and potatoes—was soon to follow.

  In a way, Wesley realized he was holding his breath, waiting for the inevitable. But it never came; there was none of the usual hypercriticism that his overcontrolling father could be counted on to level in Wesley’s direction, none of the silent and ever-rigid disapproval that always emanated from his mother’s gaze when it turned in his direction. This time there was only warmth and love and approval, all those feelings for which he had yearned the entire span of his childhood.

  In the back of his mind, Wesley knew there was a more realistic present day, one where his legs and hands were achingly raw with the cold of an unnatural interior winter. But the radiance of his parents’ love, never before experienced, outweighed that—literally overrode the iciness creeping through his veins and body. That feeling of cold was probably nothing more serious than the fire burning itself out in the fireplace, and a simple rekindling would take care of that, wouldn’t it? What he was seeing in front of him was the kind of Christmas that should have been, the type of happy holiday that the other children in his life had so taken for granted but which he had been denied. Wesley had wanted this, exactly this, for so many years…

  How could he turn away from it now?

  From the corner of his eye, Gunn could see Wesley standing only a few feet away, could see the way the dark hair on his friend’s unmoving head was slowly being dusted over with snow. At first the snowflakes had melted from Wesley’s body heat, giving his hair a little bit of a wet sheen; now they were “sticking,” as those who lived in colder climates liked to say of snow that gathered on the streets and didn’t melt, and slowly piling up on top of each other to give Wesley a close-fitting cap of pure white.

  Did his own scalp look the same way? He had no hair to insulate the snow from his body heat, so more of it would melt before it “stuck.” But he couldn’t feel his scalp, couldn’t feel anything, in fact. His entire body was just…there, like some big piece of cheek flesh that had gotten a massive shot of Novocain from the friendly neighborhood dentist. It would have worried him, except he had other things to think about right now.

  Like what he could see from the corner of his other eye.

  His sister Alonna sat at the tiny table in the dining room of a small apartment, and Gunn could see himself sitting across from her. It was Christmas—that much was obvious by the red and silver garlands hung across the windows and the dozen or so Christmas cards she’d taped up along the sides of the dining room door—the place was too small for a tree, but Alonna wasn’t going to let that stop her from being festive. They were laughing about something, probably some inane joke or crack that he’d made; in the time before her death, he
had been like that, cracking jokes now and then, making smart-alecky but not cruel remarks about life in general. It was funny to see himself doing that now, because he could tell by the way Alonna looked that she was older than she had been when she’d been turned into a bloodsucker herself. There was something on the table between them…a photo album, pages splayed open to pictures of times past and times that never would be, they couldn’t be because the people in them—friends and relatives—were long dead and gone.

  But…were they really? He had to wonder, because Alonna wasn’t a vampire here, no sir; that was proven by the glitteringly bright sunshine pouring through the double set of narrow windows behind the table. He could see the light painting her face with warm, butter-colored stripes, watched as dust motes danced along the rays like gold glitter. It made Alonna more beautiful than she’d ever been, and it made Gunn happier than he’d been in years. After all, Alonna alive and happy, this small, clean, cheerful apartment, the sunshine—this was the way things should have been, the way it all would have worked out if he’d just done a proper job of protecting her the way he’d promised. She’d be alive and laughing, just like this, and right now, and while he might be a little chilly around the edges—landlords were always skimping on the darned heat in apartment buildings—all he wanted in the world to do was watch her and not break the enchantment of this marvelous vision….

  “Guys,” Angel said desperately, “you have to snap out of it or you’re going to freeze to death. You can’t just stand here and let it…do whatever it’s doing to you!”

  It had taken immense effort, but he’d finally been able to force himself to move. Everything was sluggish though, as if the fluids in his body had gone to slush; still, whatever dark force kept his dead body animated also kept him from fully freezing. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that the rest of the gang would not be so lucky.

  Angel gritted his teeth and made his legs work, dragging his feet forward under the weight of the snow layered over them. It felt like it took forever to cross the few feet of space and put himself in front of Wesley and Gunn. They stood side by side, their gazes locked on something that only they could see—actually, Angel wasn’t even sure they were seeing anything. Or if they were, were they seeing the same thing? There was no way to tell.

  “Wesley?” Angel tried to bring up his hand and wave it in front of Wesley’s eyes, but it felt weighted and slow, as though he were trying to lift a hundred-pound dumbbell through chilled molasses. “Wesley, can you hear me?” He finally got his fingers up to eye level and passed them—oh, so slowly—in front of Wesley’s face. No response. “Gunn?” he asked, turning toward the other guy. “Are you in there?”

  No response, not even an eye blink. Angel shuddered, but not from the cold. It was more of a sympathy movement—there was no doubt that his two friends were well on their way toward hypothermia. If he wanted to save their lives, he was going to have to find a way to get them out of here, but in his present condition, Angel didn’t think he could lift an empty laundry basket, much less a full-grown man.

  He turned back and looked toward the women, but they were in the same state, standing as though paralyzed, staring into oblivion. “Cordelia?” he asked hopefully. “Fred?” Neither answered, crushing his hope that they might be reachable because they hadn’t been subjected to whatever this was for as long as Wesley and Gunn had. He grimaced as he studied their faces and saw traces of blue starting to form above the delicate lines of their lips.

  Angel heard movement off to the side and swung toward it, his body leaden. Yes—there was something in the corner, something he’d almost forgotten about in his thoughts of his friends. What was it? There was only one way to find out, and he plodded forward, each leg feeling as though it weighed two hundred pounds. Four steps, then five, and another, and he was only six feet away from the whitewashed shadows when the beast rose up in front of him….

  There was glitter and glamour and more movie stars than Cordelia could shake a Versace handbag at. In the back of her mind, Cordelia knew she was in the laundry room—of course she was—but in the front of her mind, the place where dreams and desires are made, she wasn’t even close. Instead she was in a mansion on Palos Verdes Drive, forty-plus rooms overlooking the Pacific Ocean just north of the Royal Palms Beach, thank you very much. She knew just the one, too—she’d passed it dozens of times during her years in La-La-Land, always wondering how the huge, pale pink structure looked on the inside if all those balconies and walkways led to rooms that held as much allure as the outside of the building did. Not too far down the road was the famous Portuguese Bend, where the land was literally moving constantly, because of fault line shifting; one never knew when a crack might appear in the road, and the highway had repair lines drawn across it all along the way like wide concrete scars. This was about as much unpredictable excitement as Cordelia was interested in dealing with.

  Well, now she finally knew all about the inside of that lovely pink palace.

  Stars and producers and directors drifted in and out of doorways, chatting with each other and with her as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And it was—that was the beauty of it; this was her mansion, her party, these were her friends. She wasn’t a wannabe actress wearing a seashell bikini in a tanning lotion commercial where the focus was the hot bod on which she was expected to rub the oily glop. She was herself here, Cordelia Chase, winner of two Oscars for best actress and halfway through directing the first of her own movies.

  She smiled and nodded at people as they passed by, accepting compliments from James Cameron and Ron Howard on her sequined Valentino gown, and exchanging pleasantries with the likes of Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon before deftly sidestepping Russell Crowe. She was wiser than that, knew better than to get involved with a heartbreaker like him—better to keep her options open for someone single and a little lower on the naughty scale.

  Besides the house and her friends and acquaintances, there were classy one-carat diamond earrings—real ones—in her ears and a diamond and ruby pendant around her neck that matched her exquisite gown; a seven-thousand-dollar bracelet encircled one wrist, and even her designer shoes—notorious things for being secret sources of aggravation—were comfortable. Oh yes, it was a fine life indeed, and she was so glad she’d come out here instead of heading off to college after that horrifying tax debacle back in Sunnydale. It hadn’t taken long at all for several of the top producers and directors to recognize her talent, and now look at how far she’d come.

  Cordelia smiled again automatically as someone touched her arm, one of the studio directors she’d been dealing with over the past week and who was trying to cultivate a better relationship with her for the future. She listened to what he was saying with only half an ear, pulling away slightly and managing—just barely—to suppress a frown at how terribly, terribly cold his fingers were….

  Wow, Fred thought. Look at all the fun I missed.

  Christmas in Texas—there was truly nothing like it in the world, at least as far as she was concerned. And wasn’t it great that she was suddenly being given the chance to experience all the ones she’d missed during the time she had been stranded on Pylea? There was her mom and dad, and—oh! There were her two favorite aunts, both wacky as boxes of gift nuts, but then everyone knew you kind of had to cut a little slack for family members.

  Laughing and spinning—gosh, it seemed like all those years of missed holidays were somehow happening at once. There were people in here she didn’t even know, but she was also just as sure that they were family members, second or third cousins or the married sister-in-law of someone’s brother. Texas was big on family, just like it was big on tradition, and she had this weird sort of compound vision going on, kind of like a fly’s view of the world through a number of its eyes’ ommatidiums. Hers were limited to five views but of course they were all at once; she could see one view that included each of the years she’d spent on Pylea. Now she knew how they would have be
en spent had she not been sucked through that stupid portal.

  It was so cool, like watching a progression of life frame by frame. In each one the tree in her parents’ big living room changed, of course, because they always had a real tree, never any of this plastic or silk stuff. Sometimes it was a little bigger, sometimes a little smaller. One year it actually tilted a few degrees to the left—obviously Dad hadn’t quite gotten the trunk straight in the tree holder. New ornaments were added and the tree got more and more crowded—the Burkle family had never believed in Decorating Lite. Tucked haphazardly among the soft pine needles was everything from little wooden cowboy boots to brass cacti and armadillos, from multicolored hand-blown globes to little replicas of the Texas state flag.

  In her mind, Fred wandered from visual to visual. The gifts changed as much as the tree, wrappings and ribbons morphing magickally from one year to the next as the season’s styles changed as quickly as the clothes. She saw with amusement that during those five years her mother had reupholstered the living room furniture not once, but twice—she always had that “Martha Stewart” flair for making a house look fancy. The thought made Fred grin; how horrified she must have been the first time she’d seen Fred’s room at the hotel in Los Angeles, with its thousands of mathematical calculations scribbled haphazardly across every free wall surface.

  Dinnertime, and Fred didn’t know which scene to look at first. Yeah, people had their traditions, but in her house Dad was the Christmas cook, and they never knew from one year to the next what was on the menu for the big day. One year they had big beef barbeque ribs drenched in spicy homemade sauce, the next turkey stuffed with roasted chestnuts and sausage, the next an orange-glazed goose stuffed with dried fruit and plump cranberries. And don’t forget the spiral-sliced ham, or the year Dad had really surprised them by going all Italian on them, right down to the dark chocolate ravioli with white chocolate sauce for dessert. Fred could literally feel how stuffed she was from overeating, how pleasantly numb she always got when she pushed away from the Christmas dinner table and retreated to the family room with the rest of the relatives, sinking gratefully onto the couch to languish in the familiar food coma.