“Christ, Pam, not here ... not like this,” he protested. How damned horny was she?
He pulled her to her feet, returning her kisses, suggesting they go to his place. She blanched at the idea, saying she couldn't wait a moment longer. She lit into him again and he held tight, troubled, feeling as if she were on something. Again, the faint whispers in the darkness all around them. Was it the wind through the trees?
God, she was taking his clothes off piece by piece.
Whispers ... distinct whispers, as if an audience were watching. Then he wondered about Curtis, Loomis, and Ray Carroll; might they've doubled back to follow him at a distance? Maybe they'd come to a halt when he did, and were now inching closer and closer for the floor--or road--show.
But just then all his questions were answered. He now saw the cause of the whispers and rustling. He saw a bevy of black-winged southern Illinois rodents rising on battling limbs to nearby treetops. It was too dark to see from where they originated, but there were countless numbers of the feeding little beasts fluttering and flapping wildly, romping on the air currents after insects. Bats ... bats fleeing into the night from nowhere. There had to be a nearby cave in those ridges in the distance. He thought of the old song The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.
She smothered his mouth with hers, tearing out his tongue with hers, biting it, drawing a taste of blood.
“Rough sex,” she whispered in his ear. “You like it rough? Like me to nip you elsewhere? Want to feel it? Feel it?”
“Pamela,” he said, trying to get control of her.
She dropped from his mouth to his throat and sank her teeth into his neck at the curvature where it met the right shoulder. The pain was instant and yet over as quickly as the intense flash of a camera. And then it was good. She was on him and he wanted her to be on him. She was sucking savagely at the punctures, salivating and making a rubbery-lipped noise as he, passive and blank, lay back under her weight with feelings of intense pleasure and pain, light and dark, good and evil mingling all in one. It was a sexual act like none he'd ever known, violent, shattering, and somewhere deep within his mind Abe Stroud wanted two things: he wanted not to stop her and he wanted her to kill him with her intense desire for him. No one had ever made him feel this way: so wanted, so needed. She made it clear to him that he, and he alone, nourished her need....
Faint ... fainter ... faintest and nothing with a smile on his lips ... strong, powerful, ex-Marine, ex-cop, she reduced him to nothing, and he welcomed the reduction.
Then everything went black.
It did not need to feed. It had not come to feed, only to watch with the enormous eyes of the wolf from deep within the cover of darkness. It had plenty of nourishment and did not require more. Tonight's hunt was of another kind. Tonight it watched the men in their machines, crisscrossing its territory, coming so close to it that it could look down on them with a sneer, smile, and think of them as future meat grazing upon ground that would belong to it forever.
At one point it grew tired of watching the hunters until it felt a sudden deep sickness from within, a fear that came whenever Stroud was near. It hadn't at first realized that Stroud was with them, but now it knew.
The form of the wolf was replaced quickly by that of the rolling green fog that it created of itself--its essence. It was the essence of decay, the same essence that fed the great many crawling creatures on its own body--the hangers-on. It fed these bloodsuckers with its own supply of blood, was mother and father to them. They'd spawned inside it: ticks, worms, weevils, fleas. The insects reciprocated in a variety of ways, spreading disabling and sometimes mesmerizing diseases to humans which in turn helped it to feed itself. It was as symbiotic a relationship as nature--or the unnatural--had ever devised. It had stood the test of time.
White worms that were spawned at the rectus, created of its organs, and a constant reminder of what it was--a being that defied death--also enjoyed being fed when it caught its prey. They then helped in cocooning up the leavings where it hung them in caves.
The one that spawned all such maggots, of course, was the ruler of all darkness, the thing itself--the Andover Devil, Banaker's own creation gone awry, the one part of him that he'd been unable to control.
It toured the night in its cloak of fog, skimming over the earth like a spirit, perching over the Spoon and running its ethereal atoms along its course, ruler of all that it surveyed. It knew of Stroud as the name had been passed through the generations of its forebears as the cause of much calamity. It must see Stroud dead this night, and for this it had come hunting.
When it happened on the puny humans with their guns and landrovers, it hadn't at first felt Stroud's presence. When it did, it was as if it could feel a pounding of several blows to its most vital organ, the heart, kept alive by its unquenchable thirst for blood--the heart revived from death and created from death in this case. Its parentage had been pure-blood vampires, which made it the child of death. Death had made love to death and it was spawned. Now it was here to take from life, to feed on life. But Stroud worried it where it waited in the dark. Stroud made it fear for its own existence.
It had raced from Stroud's party, not wishing to force an encounter, knowing that Stroud was strong and that he possessed magical means and capabilities that could penetrate its otherwise impenetrable strength. Why not leave Stroud to Banaker? To Banaker and to the lovely Pamela Carr?
But even if it left Stroud to this certain end, it wanted to watch. So it had perched high in a tree to do exactly this. The fog of its being had coalesced into the winged creature that was larger than any bat ever depicted by human naturalists or human imagination. And so it hung there, suspended, sightless. The eyes of the minions living upon it searched the night as it searched with its echo-location equipment.
It became confused when Pamela took Stroud in her embrace, for its side to side sonar received the message back that she'd broken off her attack! It located Stroud on the ground and she doubled over on the road. It was confused. They should be locked in Stroud's death throes together, she taking his essence into her. But something unforeseen had occurred. Stroud had worked some magician's trick to dislodge her from the hold she had on him and he was now crawling away from her, wounded but still very much alive, his body in roiling spasms.
It waited, sent out more echoes. She was, it could tell, aware of its presence but unsure just which of her kith and kin was watching.
It held on, patient, waiting ... waiting ... fearful of interference at this time for more reason than who Stroud was.
Then it began to receive images, movement down there on the road to Stroud Manse. Patience, it told itself, patience of demons.
-13-
When Stroud awoke, he was in the ditch beside the road, facedown, rough, sawing blades of grass cutting at him, a cold chill in his bones and a feeling of aloneness in his heart. But he heard and felt the patter of many living things around him, from insects in the undergrowth to screeching birds awakened and taking flight. Rushing life in disarray, flapping in all directions, including the skies: the bats?
He moaned with the internal weakness he felt. It was as if he'd gone consecutive days and nights without sleep or rest, so drained was he. It was as if he'd given back to back transfusions.
He sensed he was alone in the ditch, left for dead. He tried to turn himself over but his arms and legs were twisted and gnarled. At the same time, he didn't have any goddamned strength in his limbs.
With force of will rather than muscle, he rocked himself in the high grass until he turned, his legs cascading open like budding flowers. His hands hurt, his fingers were pinched and crossed. He'd been hit by his infamous seizure while Pamela was making love to him.
“Damn ... oh, God ... no,” he moaned. The bite to the neck, the sudden vampire attack she made upon him ... all a sick vision brought on by his own lunatic mind.
But when he opened his eyes she was there, standing over him, not kneeling, and her tone was like that of a truck d
river.
“Goddamn you ... you bastard ... what sort of disease do you have? Is it contagious? Well, is it? You might've warned me! Do you have AIDS, Stroud? Do you, damn it? Oh, my Lord ... my blood's contaminated, isn't it?”
“No, Pam, I don't have AIDS, and you can quit worrying about your blue blood. Will you help me up, please?”
“You went ... you went crazy. Look at the bruises you brought up on me.” She showed him her elbow and knee where they'd been scraped. “I thought you were going to hurt me.”
“More likely to hurt myself in such a seizure.”
“Seizure? Is it ... you know ... a hereditary thing?”
The question made him think of the mad Ezeekial Stroud and of his recent discoveries about his Grandfather Ananias as well. “I think, Pamela, we'd better call it a night. Don't know about you, but I ... I kinda lost the mood.”
She nodded and he saw vomit alongside the pavement, vomit that looked unnaturally bloody and yellow, almost like afterbirth, there on the roadbed. “I got a little sick,” she mewed.
“I'm sorry.” He wound up apologizing to her now as he got into his Jeep. “I should've done this to begin with,” he told her, revving up the engine and cutting around her sports car, driving down, and then out of the ditch where he'd been lying. He stopped short just the other side of her car and backed up to shout, “Not that you're likely to need it, or take it, Pam, but I'm going to give you a bit of advice.”
She was getting into her car at this point. “Advice?”
“Go a little slower in your next romantic adventure; you know, give a guy a chance to ask you to dinner, maybe pluck a rose for you, take you home to a cozy fire and an upstairs bed.”
“I'm sorry, Abe...”
“You going to be safe? Get home all right from here?”
She laughed at this. “I'm a big girl.”
“So I noticed.”
“You're sure now ... it's not a blood disease?”
This returned him to the anger he'd felt on waking to find her more concerned with her scraped elbow than his condition. She could no more love anyone than a boa constrictor loved anyone, he realized, knowing he did not want to see Pamela Carr ever again.
Abe's wheels burned rubber on the old paved road as he raced for the confines of Stroud Manse. Maybe it was a great deal safer behind bars there; maybe Grandfather Ananias had ought to've left the bars up all 'round the place.
Stroud momentarily wondered just what kind of doctor Pamela Carr was going to become after her residency at Banaker Institute. A medical professional so completely ignorant of the symptoms of AIDS, not to mention her morbid fear, was unusual. And yet, as a cop in Chicago he'd known many a nurse who'd dropped out of the profession out of just such fears. But this did not explain her revulsion at the convulsions she'd witnessed in him to the point of becoming physically ill. She'd make a lousy physician at best.
The iron gates of home came into his view just as he drove through a wave of fog. Stroud reached up to his throat, feeling something thick and damp clinging there. The white, maggoty leech that he touched there and which now discolored his hand with a red trail curled up and died. His neck was bleeding from a painful, deep incision of some sort. Pamela had cut him and had left him the bizarre prize of the leech.
The mad, convulsive fit that Dr. Stroud had gone through had both terrified and revolted Pamela Carr. One moment she was on the rhythmic sway of his blood as it flowed into her through the tubes at the center of her fangs, and the next he was twisting out of her control. He had overpowered her with bruising blows and kicking. She had been completely unprepared for his sudden surge of strength, as if he were immune to the hypnosis of the vampiress.
She now feared the consequences of not having dispatched Stroud as Dr. Banaker had wanted. But it was not her fault, she silently counseled herself. She'd only just begun the deadly transfusion when he, in a blind rage, reacted in so startling a manner as to throw her into a paroxysm of fear. She'd heard tales all her unnatural life of human disease and decay and how disease was spread among Stroud's kind. Suppose his convulsions were the symptoms of some dreaded disorder, and suppose even a vampiress like herself could catch it? According to Banaker, the vampire gene had been suffocated by human disorders, diseases that caused the introduction of aging into the lives of vampires, for instance. Banaker told cautionary tales, and he knew the history of his kind. He explained that those born to vampire parents were purer of heart, purer of the contaminates of mankind, than those, like her, who had not been born a vampire. Pamela had been made a vampire by Banaker, who had reclaimed her from an early grave, sharing his vampire genes and his vampire blood with her beautiful, young form.
Some vampires, like Dolphin for instance, believed since a vampire was by definition a walking dead, that no disease could touch him, that he was immortal by virtue of being a vampire. Nothing could be further from the truth. Vampires were given to severe depression and a weakening of their energies, and like addicts, the only cure was a blood binge.
It was, according to Banaker, through the arrogance of the race and the arrogance of such youths as Dolphin that vampires had become near extinct, because they had had their bloodline diluted over the generations, and infected by the host of human disorders that accompanied living in the midst of their prey.
A creature of Satan, feeding on carrion that was tainted, no less than a bird that swallows a diseased insect, might survive, but over generations and generations, the chemistry of the vampire had slowly given way to human frailties. One of these was aging, a problem Banaker was frantically attempting to correct through a research project the U.S. government had no idea it was funding.
Although the aging process in a pire was far slower than in his human counterpart, the days of vampires who lived to see successive generations come and go, were gone. Unless Banaker could succeed in fully restoring the primal vampire gene back to its original state.
As for vampires like her, Pamela's bones had grown and she had reached maturity only through the miracles wrought by Banaker. She was dug from her grave as a child of nine, dead of meningitis. He had literally raised her from the dead, creating of her not a vampire born of pire parentage, but a bastardization of his kind. Yet, he had always treated her as if she were a daughter, until now ... until Stroud had arrived. Now he had used her like a whore.
Banaker had frequently warned her of the horrid possibilities of feeding directly from the human host, that she must feed on the elixir distilled at the Institute, where the blood was fortified with the vampire strain, screened and tested and purified. She'd never fed on a man like Abraham Stroud before, a man going into an epileptic type of seizure in the throes of her passionate vampiric embrace. It had so shocked her.
It had therefore been natural for her to instantly let go of the bite, repulsed by the twisted human form at the other end.
These thoughts and more weaved through her mind as she pictured herself in Banaker's office the next morning trying to explain the unexpected end to the evening. She went toward her own car, preparing to leave. The red was a purple under the cover of darkness, the white interior a soft beige. She was given the car by Banaker, her mentor and her “father.” Pamela Carr's headstone still stood at the Andover Memorial Gardens Cemetery on Dunne near Sycamore, on the outskirts of Andover. Sometimes, when she'd visit she'd stand before the tombstone and read the chiseled lettering and wonder about the little girl who'd died so many years before. The headstone read:
Susan Marie Muncie
Beloved Daughter
1947--1956
Beside this headstone were other people named Muncie, Susan's parents. Pamela was drawn to the spot even as a child, although none of the others had ever told her that Susan Marie Muncie and Pamela Carr were one and the same--at least in body. No one needed to tell her.
Her life was the life of the recycled body. It was not so cowardly an existence, after all, and the torturous hunger was controllable, so long as she got her
supply. And she got that supply, like all the others, from Banaker. She owed her life to Banaker. There was no failing him ... and yet, she had failed him miserably tonight.
She opened her car door, but the sound of a beating wind made her look up just in time to see the massive black cloud blotting out the sky overhead. Her inner sonar told her that it--he, Banaker--was coming for her.
She must either face him here, like this, or flee. She'd failed him most certainly, and she expected his wrath, but she did not expect his punishment to come in this form and so swiftly. Why had he chosen to approach her in his most sinister and threatening aspect? When a vampire concealed himself in a black fog created via the cold breath stored in its lungs, it was stalking.
It came like an animal, creeping toward her. It intended to show itself as it truly was: a huge, carnivorous bat with hard, unseeing black eyes, peaked ears, and fangs twice the size of any snake's--a creature blessed by Satan, that picked its way about with sonar so accurate that it could reach down with its massive talons to rip off her head or hoist her to its mouth to slowly drain life from her.
Was this Banaker coming?
But he had worked so tirelessly and long to create a community of Pires who could live in mutual harmony and peace with humankind, going undetected among them. She thought of all the grueling years of service that she had spent in helping fulfill the goals of Banaker's Institute, thought of the years of lab work, searching endlessly for better and better blood additives, preservatives, and substitutes. She'd been there when the discovery came on withstanding sunlight. She recalled the experiments with the cross. She helped on fund raisers and drives, and saw to it that the monies were diverted instead to the study of rare blood disorders and poor strains among her kind, and how to improve the stock. She recalled the breakthrough in the DNA lab. They'd been testing a theory of Banaker's: that bone marrow held many of the ingredients for vampire needs. Banaker was proved right. He'd been ecstatic for days over the discovery.
Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) Page 13
