“April Greenhill?” Cagey prompted her noncommittally, as I was still trying to remember whether we had mentioned our client’s name to M. Gambol.
“A good friend of his. Perfectly platonic, as far as I know. He has quite a number of good friends, both genders. He genuinely enjoys friendships.”
Cagey’s reply could have sounded sardonic, but somehow didn’t, despite its “hardboiled” quality. “Not a bad little hobby,” she said. “Which of his parents was driving?”
“I think it was his father’s body they found more nearly behind the wheel, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. It was definitely the UPS driver’s fault. That was very well established.”
“Who took him in after that?”
“Aunt and Uncle Tormquist kept him for about three years, and then we started taking turns. Oh, yes, I know how that may sound to outsiders. The poor, unwanted orphan shunted around from household to household of grudging relations. But it was never that way at all. Aunt Tormquist had to be hospitalized for a month, and that was when Aunt Cele—Cecilia—and Uncle Jan took him. After that, Pete himself—that was Clem’s kid name—suggested moving around from home to home. To get to know more of the family better. Both families, I should say, his father’s and his mother’s. To find his own perceptional development. He was just getting into the age where that becomes a big concern. His mother’s people are almost all reality perceivers, even if some of them do keep up quite a few of their old ethnic customs. Most of the fantasy perceivers are in our side, his father’s people. I’m almost borderline fancier myself. It’s well under control, and not very noticeable anyway, but I tend to live in the world the way it was when I was a kid, to have a little marginal trouble perceiving change, new packaging on old, familiar products, that kind of thing. It may get to be a problem when I’m old and gray.”
“Not necessarily,” Cagey told her. “Take me. With a few adaptations for modern amenities, I live pretty much eighty to a hundred years ago. It can be fun. Anyway, you’d say your cousin’s childhood was reasonably happy and secure?”
“Aside from the tragedy of losing his parents, as happy and secure as we could make it. If any household on either side of his family didn’t want to take him for a summer or a school year, they simply didn’t. There are plenty of us who have always loved having him. It’s also had the side effect of bringing all of us—his father’s people and his mother’s—much closer together than you’ll find in a lot of people’s families.
“Oh,” she went on, as Cagey continued watching her with polite attention, “you’re still fishing around for how he became a vampire, aren’t you? All right, I’ll tell you. The summer he was eleven, he was in a diving accident out on Wolf Lake near the Minnemagantic border. He hit some old wreckage that should have been dredged out years before, concussed his head and lost quite a bit of blood, as well as nearly drowning. Naturally, he ended up in the hospital. It was a little country hospital, and I suppose it could have been better monitored. Or they might have left him unsupervised a little too long, thinking he was out of danger. Anyway, he had an NDE—near death experience. It started out as the good kind but it must have ended as the unpleasant kind, because to this day he firmly believes that he was called back by the bite of a vampire—a dark, shadowy stranger bending over him, who turned and left the room somehow before Clem—Pete, his name still was then—came fully awake, with the taste of blood in his mouth. I don’t imagine I need to tell you that nobody else could ever detect the bite marks or see the fangs growing, and nobody else ever reported a glimpse of Clem’s mysterious stranger. But it is a fact that the machine monitors recorded a near cessation of all vital signs, followed by a sudden spontaneous resurgence even before the medics got to him, and that all his self-perceived vampire symptoms date from that hospital stay. When he started relapsing afterward, insisting he needed blood to drink, and they couldn’t find any organic reason for him to be losing ground, the doctor in charge finally prescribed a few quarter-liters of bloodbank blood ‘to be administered orally at mealtimes,’ and Clement perked right up.”
“Interesting,” said Cagey. “And he hadn’t shown any previous inclinations to this kind of perceptional world? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“No, aside from the occasional monster screenplay and ghost-story session all kids enjoy, I’m fairly sure he hadn’t. I remember getting the old Reeltime ‘Dracula’ with Bela Lugosi from the public library and watching it with him ... I think that would have been the first summer he stayed with us, a year or two before it happened. We packed in a ride of Reeltime monsters that summer. Our local library still had a policy of no age minimum for renting out pre-1960 movies, no matter what their contents or subject matter. We went through ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘King Kong,’ ‘The Wolf Man,’ some old thing called ‘Nos ... Nostrumatus’?”
“‘Nosferatu’?” I supplied. “Wow!”
“That may have been it. Silent. We couldn’t make much sense out of it.”
“No, I’m not surprised,” I interjected. “Not if you saw it as preteeners. But, wow! Did you get ‘Freaks’ at that age, too?”
“‘Freaks’? No, I guess we must have missed that one. I don’t recall that he was particularly impressed by ‘Dracula.’ Certainly he never seriously tried to affect a Bela Lugosi accent. If anything, you’d have expected him to go into a ‘Phantom of the Opera’ world. He wanted to see every version of that one that the library could and would let us have. My folks still have most of his old ‘Phantom’ collection in the attic for him. ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ would probably have been his second favorite ... or was that mine? But no, quite frankly, I think that if he had gone fancy-class in the general sense, he would have slipped into an Age of Martyrs world. Probably Ancient Rome or Medieval Slavic. He told me once that all the romance went out of the Reformation Centuries for him when it sank in that his father’s side of the family was almost entirely Protestant, and he wasn’t about to start perceiving us as persecuting enemies. Personally, I’m just as happy he’s a vampire. Much better than a belabored Christian in any Age of Martyrs. But I really think he’d have ended up straight reality perceiver if it hadn’t been for that accident and hospital trip.”
“Yes,” said Cagey. “You know, I could understand that hospital episode if he’d had any previous leanings in that direction, but ...”
“Well, who knows about these NDE’s?” M. Gambol went on. “Aren’t they supposed to change people’s lives for the better? He chose his adult name—Clement, consider what it means as a simple modifier—while he was still in the hospital recovering, still ‘growing his teeth,’ so to speak. As a kid, he was Peter Batory Black, or did I say that? You know, as far as I could see, he had remarkably few of the typical teenage problems.”
Cagey was sitting with one thumb beneath her chin, the little finger of that hand unconsciously tapping her front teeth. “Maybe,” she mused, “there really was somebody bending over him. Some nurse or candystriper, say, who stepped in to check on him, and was shy about saying so afterwards for some reason. Maybe because of having left his side at a crucial moment. Or maybe the person had hurried out to get a medic and never connected him- or herself with the vampire of Clement’s vision. Or it might have been some visitor in dark clothing who was looking for some other patient entirely and never even guessed what effect the chance encounter had.”
“Or it might have been a real vampire,” M. Gambol quipped, easy enough with us by now to make a little joke. “Vacationing in Minnemagantic and having difficulty arranging a more regular withdrawal from the local blood bank. But see here, ‘Lieutenant’ Thursday—” I could hear the slight artificial emphasis she put on Cagey’s costume title this time—”if he’s only been gone since last night, hardly long enough to be called a missing person yet, and you feel safe in assuming he isn’t in any danger, and you aren’t after him for any suspected dracula activities, then why, exactly, have you
come here asking about him and worrying me?”
I would have been caught. Cagey, however, replied smoothly, “We’re trying to locate him as a possible source of data about someone else. April Baxter Greenhill, as a matter of fact.”
“April Greenhill ...?”
“Yes. That was why I did a doubletake when you brought the name up spontaneously a few minutes ago.”
“Did you? I didn’t notice.”
“A mental doubletake,” Cagey amended. “Of course, I should have understood that any friend of your favorite cousin’s ... Maybe you can help us out with our questions about M. Greenhill.”
“I doubt it.” Our hostess shook her head. “I know almost nothing about her except what Clement has told me, which is all in her glowing praise. But why are you asking about her? Is she missing, too?”
“Not missing, no,” Cagey replied, “but she just lost another boyfriend last week.” When M. Gambol blinked uncomprehendingly, my lieutenant explained, “Solly Goldfein.”
“Oh! Poor Solly, I was just back there for his funeral. Was he her boyfriend?”
Cagey nodded. “Like Anthony T. Tallpines last year. As long as we’re here, M. Gambol, what can you tell us about either or both of them?”
“Nothing about M. Tallpines. He was somebody else’s protege entirely. I would have gotten to know him as a Pi Rho, if ... But Solly was a chipmunk. A dear. Clement’s best friend. Everybody loved Solly. If he had been drinking that night, then it must have been the first time in his life that he ever drove under the influence.”
“Which can sometimes happen,” Cagey observed, “when people don’t have much experience with alcohol and the effect it has on their own systems.”
“Possibly. I find it much easier to believe that some other drunken lunatic speedster sideswiped him off the road and sped on. At least the UPS driver that got Clement’s parents couldn’t hit and run. There was too much other traffic around that day.”
Cagey sat rolling her coffee mug between her palms, thinking, I guessed, of how likely such an accident as M. Gambol pictured might have been to send Solly’s antique gasoline burner—or, for that matter, one of the classic and rarely driven gasoline burners in the Warrington garage—up in flames.
“As for April Greenhill,” our hostess went on, “if we’d ever rushed her, or even if Clem had ever hinted to me that she might want to be rushed, then I’d probably be able to tell you quite a lot about her, whether it would be what you want to know or not. But I gather that she has no interest in sororities, and since she’s in the same class as Clem, two years behind me, and in a different field of study—hard sciences, I think—our paths never crossed in classes or coursework, either. I think that I have been introduced to her—at Solly’s funeral?—but I’m not sure I’d even recognize her again by sight.”
Cagey asked, “You mean your cousin doesn’t bring her to Greek functions as his date?”
“Oh, no. He doesn’t date at all unless it’s required for attendance—for instance, at the formal End of the Semester Dance—and then he brings a Butterscotch girl he knows. Japanese, I think. Anyway, a magnificent Pureblood. He must feel completely safe with her. She wouldn’t compromise a genetic heritage that perfect with anyone else but another Pureblood Butterscotch.”
Cagey and I exchanged a quick glance. It was obvious that our dracula’s cousin knew very little about his Lucy—or Mina, whichever Keiko Kato Ko-Ko might be to him.
We stayed long enough to verify that M. Gambol knew almost equally little about April; to reassure her that in the outside chance there turned out to be any grounds for concern about her cousin, we’d give her a call; and to get a fuller list of family members than Keiko’s database had been able to provide.
XIII
(Whispering Pines Rest Home)
He sat tight beneath the old man’s window at the Whispering Pines Rest Home, one ear pressed to the wall, listening hard. Sometimes somebody—never the old man, who’d been bedridden for years—came to the window and looked out at the view, but that never worried him. Every window at Whispering Pines had a big, oldnationed window box. That was one of the selling points of the place. The old man’s was still full of late-blooming marigolds and pansies. She planted them herself, and kept them trim and tended throughout the summer, but at this time of year he didn’t think she’d bother. Not today, anyway. She seemed too busy listening to the old man’s stories.
A lot of good it did him to listen in on them with her. Tired, garbled, rambling old memories, mostly of things that hardly mattered at all. Back and forth between dodging the Viet Nam draft, and the first celebrations for the Signing of the Reformed Constitution, finally becoming computer literate at age sixty-seven in 2008, and the confusion of emigrating to North America right after the Last Great War. The old man never seemed to come up with any memories earlier than a big ship and salty waves, except that one time last year ... something about a big room with bright lights and somebody screaming, the whole scene even more garbled than most of his stories, sounding more like a dream than an actual memory. Well, what could you expect? The old man couldn’t have been more than four or five when the family escaped out of the European slaughterhouse and made it through Immigration.
He got tired very often of the old man’s voice, droning on and on and on. On the other hand, he never got tired of her voice. Lovely little voice, never impatient, always gentle with the old man. Wouldn’t be a bad way to blank out, with a voice like that at your bedside. You’d think the old man would shut up oftener and leave more of the talking to her, just for the sound of her voice.
Yes, it was going to be a real pity about April. A pity he wouldn’t be able to put it off any longer. He’d have liked to wait till, say, the end of this school year. But with Cagey Warrington sniffing around, it’d have to be tonight. This afternoon, in fact. On her way home from visiting the old man. That bend on Whispering Pines Trail two thirds of a klick from where it joined Redpath Road, the one with the nice, wide shoulders on both sides, that’d be the place to make his grab.
Here came nursie to clear up the afternoon coffee trays. Ten more minutes, and little April should be getting ready to go. Unless she was staying for supper with the old man, and she usually did that only when his mind was clearer. Today it sounded as muzzy as he’d ever heard it.
All the same, any other day he’d have sat and listened until he heard her actually get up and start saying goodbye. But this afternoon he had to be in place. Stifling a sigh, not looking forward to the last part of the wait, he slipped along the side of the building beneath the window boxes till he reached the corner, where he got up and strolled along nonchalantly. People tended not to notice other people, even caped people, when they strolled along innocent as bunnies. And if they did notice him strolling over to the parking lot, even getting into the back seat of her car, that might be all the better. They wouldn’t get suspicious until too late to do anything about it. It wasn’t as if he had to trick the car lock. Locking car doors had pretty well gone out of fashion with the Great Return to Sanity of the Thirties. He doubted whether it had ever been in fashion around Hodag Crossing.
He just got in the back seat, lay down as if for a nap, and then after another few minutes and a peek up to make sure nobody was looking in, rolled down between the back and front seats, and lurked on the floor, trying to keep his muscles from going too tense.
He hoped she didn’t decide to stay for supper in spite of the old man’s muzziness.
XIV
(From the Memoirs of Sylvia Tomlinson Marlene)
“I’m beginning to wonder,” Cagey began as we settled back into our rental car, “how wise we were, leaving April alone this afternoon.”
“She’s in her home town in broad daylight,” I pointed out, buckling myself in. “She’s certainly as safe as if she’d never come to us at all.”
“Is she? Now that half Hoda
g Crossing, including Czarny’s fraternity, knows she’s been snooping around town in our company.” My lieutenant snapped up her wristphone and keyed in Aunt Cherky’s number while I started the car.
“Roof down?” I asked.
“No, leave it up. I think I’d like to get back as fast as—Hello! M. Zigabarra. Listen, does your niece happen to be home yet? ... Oh, I see. Usually spends the whole afternoon when she goes out to see him Saturdays, huh? ... Is that right! Always stays for afternoon coffee, sometimes even for supper with him. Okay. ... No, nothing wrong, just routine, that’s all. ... Yeah, thanks. Ten-four, over and out!” The “just routine,” coming out of Cagey’s fantasy world, ought to allay any vague uneasiness she might have roused in Aunt Cherky.
“All right, Lieutenant,” said I as she switched her phone off, “if you’ll buckle yourself up, we can be on our way.”
“What? Oh, right. Yeah, Sergeant, go the limit. Maybe even five klicks over. I still think I’d like to get back to that college town as fast as we can, just on general principles. Night falls pretty early this far north at this time of year, doesn’t it?”
Not wanting to take any chances in a rented clunker with Cagey Warrington Thursday in it, even when she was sitting in the rider’s seat buckled up, I drove just touching the speed limit. Cagey paid no attention to the speedometer numbers.
Leaning back with her hands behind her head on the headrest, she remarked, “Y’know, Tommi, when Clement’s cousin gave us that line about him as a person, not a dracula, it stirred up a thought in the old brainpan: ‘Hath not a vampire eyes?’ ... Let’s see, how does the rest of it go? I used to have the whole thing by heart. My Jewish grandmother liked to say it, along with other choice bits from the Bard. Every kid oughta have at least one Jewish grandparent.”
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 136
