A Coldness in the Blood

by Fred Saberhagen

  Andy repeated the helpless gesture.

  She leaned toward him over the table, squinting. “That was really your uncle who came in? The same one we were talking about, my gramp’s friend Matthew Maule? Him and no one else? I thought he was an old man.”

  Tired of repeating the same shrug, Andy just looked at her.

  Dolly sank back in her chair. Absently she removed the turban-towel and rubbed her damp hair with it. As if to herself, she murmured: “I have to trust you, after you almost got yourself killed, trying to help me.” She picked up the last slice of pizza and set it down again, as if her appetite had suddenly failed her. “Your uncle can deal with people like that? With—with monsters?”

  “You saw. Or you heard, at least. Here we are, living proof. We walked away, didn’t we? And some of the monsters didn’t.”

  They talked some more, and Andy remarked that he couldn’t remember exactly how there had come to be train tickets. Reading the timetable that Nicolas Flamel had received in the envelope with his tickets, Andy learned that Amtrak Train Number 3, the Southwest Chief, departed Chicago’s Union Station daily at 3:20 P.M. The tickets, for one first-class compartment, were good as far as Albuquerque, though the train went on all the way to Los Angeles. The train was scheduled to arrive in Kansas City at 10:39 P.M., Dodge City at 6:01 the following morning, and at Albuquerque 4:20 in the afternoon—allowing for the time-zone difference, twenty-six hours after departure from Chicago.

  Dolly explained that Gramp had been meaning to take his girlfriend Miranda back west with him, and he’d already bought the tickets when he got really sick. When Dolly had visited him in the hospital—her car had still been running at that point—she had started to take the tickets back to the apartment, along with some of his other personal belongings. She’d left them in the glove compartment, and tonight had thoughtfully picked them up when she had stopped to get the shotgun from the trunk.

  In conclusion, Dolores sighed. “So, now you’re coming with me.” It sounded like she didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried at the prospect.

  “Unless you can convince me you’ve got a better idea. Look, I think we’re both better off sticking together than if I hang around Chicago. Besides, like I said, my Dad knows what he’s doing when it comes to this kind of stuff.”

  “So does your Uncle Matt. Evidently.”

  “Evidently. Look, Dolly, those people who grabbed us—they kept talking about little white statues, and a list of names. If you know what that was all about, I think you’d better tell me.”

  As if to herself, she murmured: “Gramp said I was going to need help.” Then she pulled herself together and spoke more briskly. “All right, Andy: I’ve been trying to think this out. Either you and I are in this together or we’re not. After what’s happened already, I have to believe we are.”

  When she paused, Andy simply nodded his agreement.

  “So. Yes, Gramp did tell me something.” She nodded emphatically and lowered her voice, as if some enemy might be listening, just outside the window. “He said there’s something very valuable—I don’t know what, but it’s got to be very small, maybe a diamond—concealed in one of a set of little white statues. None of which, believe me, have I ever seen. I don’t even know exactly what they look like, or how big they are. I’m not even sure they exist. I tried looking for them in books about Egyptian art, but the books have been no help.”

  Dolores fell silent, starting at the remaining pizza fragment as if her fate somehow depended on it. Eventually Andy thought he had to prod. “Go on.”

  “Assuming the statues are real, what must have happened is that smugglers brought them into this country from Egypt, very illegally. I don’t know what connection any of the three partners, Gramp or Dickon or Tamarack, had with that. But there must have been a connection of some kind.

  “Then there was some kind of mix-up, and the statues got stolen again, by people who didn’t realize that they were real antiquities. So they got sold off in some kind of auction, along with lots of really junky stuff, cheap imitations and modern copies of ancient art.

  “How Gramp managed to get his hands on the list of people who finally wound up with the statues I don’t know. Maybe through some kind of conjuror’s trick. But he did give me a list, and that’s what he said it is. None of the people on it will suspect that one of their cheap decorations has a giant diamond—or whatever—hidden in it.”

  “Wow. You mean you’re still carrying this list on you now? I thought, the way they were searching you … ?”

  “They didn’t look in the right place. They couldn’t.” And Dolly raised one finger and significantly tapped her own forehead. “I was always very good at memorizing.”

  Andy waited, half-expecting some revelation. But it didn’t come, and he wasn’t going to push for it. He didn’t know if he wanted to know those names or not.

  After they had finished the pizza, and shared what information they could regarding their terrors and chances, real exhaustion started to set in. In a little while kitchen chairs were no longer adequate for the job of holding their bodies up.

  Gallantly Andy offered to let Dolly have his own room for the night, but she declined.

  He tried again. “I don’t expect either of my roommates will be coming home tonight. So, you can take one of their rooms, if you like. But I can’t be absolutely sure. There’s a chance one of them might come in and …”

  Dolores was shaking her head emphatically. “I’m sleeping in my clothes—excuse me, in your roommate’s clothes—out on the sofa, where I can hear everything that goes on. And we’re putting the chain on the door, and however many locks you’ve got. And moving some furniture in front of it.”

  Scrounging a blanket and pillow from one of the two unoccupied bedrooms, and declining Andy’s offer of help, Dolores soon had built a small nest for herself on the living room sofa. The shotgun rested on the floor beside her, still within easy reach.

  After overseeing these preparations, Andy groggily said good night. “I’m leaving my bedroom door open. Hope you don’t jump up and shoot things in your sleep.”

  “I won’t, less’n they’re real things that need shooting.”

  Before crawling into bed, Andy drove his body once more through his routine of inspecting all of the apartment’s windows. Utterly useless, he supposed, against the kind of creatures who had almost killed him a few hours ago. But he thought the ritual might give him some chance of getting to sleep.

  His night was anything but restful. It seemed that every time he started to doze off, a rush of nameless terror brought him jerking wide awake, fists clenched, heart pounding. In the borderland of sleep, someone had just pitched him into space, and he was falling.

  After that had happened for the third time, there was a variation. Andy, who had actually fallen asleep, was awakened by a scream. He was on his feet and moving for the other room before he was fully awake. In the doorway he collided with Dolly, who came running toward him, still fully dressed—hands empty of the shotgun, he saw with great relief. With the contact, she threw herself into his arms.

  Her sturdy body was shaking, like her voice that babbled out her fear. This was no coy seduction game—not that he had really suspected, even for a moment, that it could be.

  Her face was pressed against his shoulder. She kept saying the same thing, with minor variations, over and over: “A dream … oh God, a horrible nightmare!”

  He patted her unfamiliar back, covered by his house-mate’s more or less familiar shirt, and muttered the best words he could think of. “Not surprising. There. There. It’s gonna be all right.”

  In a minute or two the worst was over. Andy gently separated himself from his new companion, and went to pull on his jeans over the undershorts in which he usually slept. Meanwhile Dolly had turned on a light, and they sat in the kitchen again, and she told him of the terrible dream. The figure of a giant crocodile had appeared to her, speaking calmly and almost rationally, and promi
sing her more horror.

  Again he muttered something about how they had to expect bad dreams, after what they had just been through.

  “No, it wasn’t anything like—like what happened in Old Town. I don’t know if it even had anything to do with that. I never saw this—this thing before. Something like a giant lizard, standing on its hind legs and talking. And I know it sounds funny, like something you can laugh at when you wake up. But it wasn’t that way, it wasn’t that way at all. Oh, God, I’m not laughing.”

  She paused. He thought she was looking at him strangely.

  He asked: “What is it?”

  “Andy, I’m going to recite the names on the list, so you can hear them. Then if something happens to me—if I don’t live through the night, or something like that—”

  “Dolly, no—”

  “No, I mean it, I’m going to recite the names and addresses. I guess I’d advise you not to write them down. But that’s up to you.”

  Five minutes later, Dolly was moving back to her nest on the sofa, and Andy started back to his room.

  On the way he paused in the doorway. “Do you want me to stay with you—?”

  “No. No, I just want to sleep. If I can.”

  At last, near sunrise, Andy, back in his own bed, managed an hour or two of troubled but still healing sleep.

  He awoke to bright sunlight, and saw on his bedside clock that it was seven-thirty. He had heard names and places, but he wasn’t at all sure he was going to remember everything correctly. He hadn’t written anything down.

  Dolores was up already, sitting at the kitchen table with dark circles under her eyes. Obviously she had fared even worse than he.

  “Sorry about last night,” was her greeting.

  “For having a nightmare? Think nothing of it. After yesterday, we’re lucky we’re both not completely crazy.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got any instant coffee. I looked in the cabinets.”

  “I don’t suppose we do. Dolly, are you sorry you told me all that stuff? Everything on your list?”

  She wasn’t going to answer that. “Do we leave early for the train station, or do we wait? Where is Union Station, anyway?”

  “I’m not exactly sure, but we can find it.”

  There was literally nothing in the house to eat for breakfast, which more or less forced them into the decision to leave early.

  Anyway, he could find no particular reason to think that sitting around in the apartment would be any safer than moving about the city. All through the night, and when daylight had come round again, Andy kept waiting for a police knock on the door—of course that would not be the worst possibility. Actually it would be a big step up from the crash of one of the monsters kicking the door in.

  But neither happened.

  Before setting out for the Loop, Andy considered leaving a message for his parents on his own answering machine. Joe and Kate had the code to access his machine remotely. But if he left a message, anyone who came into his apartment would be able to play it too. And now his Dad would be expecting him to be on the train.

  Before heading out, Andy filled a modest backpack of his own, throwing in some clothes, a razor, and a toothbrush. His pack was still lighter than Dolly’s. He had a little over a hundred dollars cash in his pocket, about as much as he ever carried, and could hope to buy a few essential items while en route. He knew that if he used his credit card it could provide the police—or maybe someone worse than the police—with an easy way to trace him.

  Dolores lugged her backpack, which had very little in it besides a couple of borrowed garments, plus the truncated shotgun and half a dozen extra shells, that she told Andy were loaded with buckshot.

  She was adamantly determined to bring the shotgun. “I don’t think they inspect your bags when you get on the train, like they do at the airport.”

  “You’re probably right. Never heard of anyone hijacking a train. If I had a gun, I’d be carrying it too.”

  Dolly had with her only the few dollars she had been carrying when she left her own apartment to walk to Old Town, less than twenty-four hours ago. The ruthless searchers in the ruined building had not bothered to relieve her of that small amount of cash; they had been too fanatically intent on finding something else.

  At a little after eight on Friday morning, the pair eased their way out of the apartment and, after breakfasting at one of Andy’s favorite stops nearby, started to make their way downtown. Aware of how thoroughly taxi drivers recorded every passenger, Andy avoided that mode of transport. There was a subway station in fairly easy walking distance, and he headed in that direction.

  She and Andy were standing together inside a crowded subway car, holding spring-loaded straps to keep from falling. At this hour the mass of commuters doing without seats on the train was almost thick enough to hold any staggering bodies upright, but Andy still liked the straps for insurance. Their train was making deafening progress through a Loop-bound tunnel, when Dolly put her lips close to his ear, and shouted against the ungodly roar: “Where does your Uncle Matt live? In case something happens and I need a rescuer again.”

  “He’s in one of those apartment towers on north Michigan. But I don’t think it would be a good idea to head for his place uninvited.”

  “Actually I don’t think so either.”

  Once they had emerged from underground into the crowds and bustle on the Loop’s hot pavements, he shopped with her in a bargain store on State Street, paying cash for a few necessities, including some simple summer clothes and a toothbrush.

  Andy was well aware that several people had seen them leaving the scene of the Old Town slaughter, and that the Chicago police might possibly be able to identify them. But so far it seemed that no one had recognized him, or Dolores either. It didn’t help that crazy Dickon knew who they were. Even if Dickon proved not to be in league with the monsters, he seemed the type who was certain to spill his guts out if he was arrested.

  Joe Keogh was wondering, again, if his phone line might be tapped, and for the third time today he started to run his best electronic means of checking that. Anyone who tuned in on his talks with Maule would think they had to be conversing in some kind of code. Well, there was nothing like a day or two of worrying about vampires, and worse, to start the paranoia flaring.

  At a busy downtown newsstand, Andy bought a morning paper, and Dolly read it with him as they sat at a table in a nearby coffee shop. The item of immediate interest was not hard to find: a story of a woman’s body, probably a murder victim, being discovered in the burned building.

  She gave Andy a newly critical look, and whispered: “If you don’t want to be recognized, you could get rid of that stupid earring. That’s something people notice.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He raised a hand halfway, but did not touch the metal; it would have to wait until they had some privacy again. Removing the ring in public would only draw attention.

  The newspaper article tentatively identified the dead woman, but said nothing about peculiar injuries. Nor did it mention either Andy or Dolores by name. The police were looking for two people matching their general description, but that was all. Andy’s earring was not mentioned. Dickon was entirely absent from the report.

  There was nothing in the paper to suggest that the police had any particular reason to be interested in the granddaughter of Nicolas Flamel, or to connect the horrors in an abandoned building with a recent tenant who had died peacefully in bed.

  They walked the busy downtown streets contained within Chicago’s Loop of elevated train tracks. They took shelter in a bookstore against a brisk midmorning shower, and sipped iced tea in two other restaurants, too nervous to stay still for long. Thinking of Dickon, Andy kept well clear of the public library, just in case.

  Somehow the hours passed.

  Union Station, built below street level into a building near the western edge of Chicago’s downtown Loop, of fered the elite among Amtrak passengers a comfortable semi-private lounge in
which to await departure. You had to show your first-class ticket to get in. Meanwhile, coach passengers were making do in a larger and less exclusive space, furnished with many chairs and the noise of competing television sets. Andy used the privacy of the men’s room to get rid of his earring.

  At a little after three in the afternoon, Dolly and Andy, along with a number of others, were summoned from their comfortable seats to board their train. Most travelers carried their own baggage out of the station and through a darkened and enormous shed, uncomfortably hot and thunderous with railroad noise. Once they had climbed aboard the train it was much quieter, and cool enough, with the big diesels already murmuring to drive the air-conditioning. Attentive stewards checked tickets and gave guidance. Their passenger car was a two-story affair, with a narrow, twisty stair leading to the upper level, where a thin corridor ran the length of the car, and the first-class compartment reserved for Mr. and Mrs. Flamel was waiting, one of a car-long row behind individual doors of curtained glass.

  The Southwest Chief pulled out right on time. A few minutes later, it made one brief stop in the vast sprawl of railroad yards just west of the Loop—to pick up mail, as the intercom announced—and by a quarter to four was gaining speed on a smooth track through Chicago’s western suburbs.

  Andy and Dolly, snugly settled into the greatest luxury Amtrak afforded, a private space hardly more than six feet by six, were breathing a joint sigh of relief. Whether the feeling was justified or not, they felt well rid of the perilous city.

  For several hours they were content just to sit in the compartment with the door locked, and feel the distance lengthening between them and the horrors of Old Town. Not until after dark did they emerge to pay their first visit to the dining car.