Fatal Bargain

by Caroline B. Cooney

  She knew instinctively that the vampire wouldn’t want a boy. That left Roxanne, who was a tough sarcastic type, and Lacey, who was a ditz. They were pretty enough, in their own boring ways, but that was all. I mean really, thought Sherree, what other choices does this vampire have but me?

  Sherree assumed that Zach or Bobby would save her.

  She did not assume that Randy would. Randy was a little too meager in personality and body to save anybody.

  Sherree studied Zach and knew that he was analyzing the situation. She had faith in his brain. He would find a good strategy. She watched Bobby. The athlete drew himself together. He had a fine body, more heavily muscled than most boys his age. No doubt he could rip a T-shirt’s sleeves by clenching his biceps. Bobby took a few steps backward, away from the door, gathering himself.

  Sherree unwound from her terrified crouch. This was not completely different from cheerleading. You had to bounce off a gym floor from the most ridiculous positions and leap up. She would spring up and follow Bobby down the stairs.

  Bobby turned himself into a battering ram.

  Sherree lifted like a sprinter at the starting line.

  Bobby flung himself across the tower and plunged through the door.

  Except that he did not go through.

  He remained in midair. Pinned to the atmosphere like a Velcro wall-jumper. Sherree stared. The door was open, and Bobby was hanging there. Not as if there were a noose around his neck, but as if he were an insect in the vampire’s collection, pinned at the joints on the bulletin board.

  The vampire indeed possessed the door. And now, clearly, he also possessed Bobby.

  Roxanne had the hammer.

  Her parents were neatness fanatics: everything in its place. If you left your shampoo bottle on the tub rim, they freaked. If you left a CD out of its plastic holder, they freaked. If you allowed a used glass to rest on the counter instead of popping it instantly inside the dishwasher, they freaked.

  So, of course, when the teenagers had gotten into the deserted mansion, and Randy yanked the plywood back to hide the opening he had made, and then absently set the hammer down on the same windowsill they had crawled over, Roxanne picked it up.

  They might accidentally leave the hammer behind.

  Or not be able to find it again in the dark.

  Especially if their flashlight batteries ran down.

  It was an ordinary enough hammer, slim handle, hard metal head and claws. She was not wearing a belt in her jeans, so she shoved the handle through a belt loop. It hung satisfyingly against her thigh, making her feel like a tough workman.

  When Bobby flew against the vampire’s space, and stuck there, Roxanne found herself wondering if she would have to pry him off with the claws of the hammer.

  “Bobby?” said Roxanne stupidly. “Are you okay?”

  Bobby said nothing.

  “Well,” said Zach, in his most maddening, above-it-all preppy voice, “I guess that lets out the door as an escape route.” Zach actually laughed. “You look a little strange up there, Bobby, my man.”

  Bobby said nothing.

  In spite of his teasing, Zach had not been amused. In fact, he had been unable to maintain his grip on the flashlight, which he dropped when Bobby smashed into the vampire’s space.

  The pounding of his heart had increased. He felt like the bass drum in a marching band — he was nothing but a huge reverberating gong. His heart was thrashing around his chest just as Bobby had thrashed against thin air.

  I’m afraid, thought Zach. He hated himself for it, hated the vampire for causing it, hated the others because they would surely see, and know.

  Lacey retrieved the flashlight.

  She examined Bobby’s predicament. Then she examined Bobby.

  Bobby said nothing.

  He was stuck there, and yet when she put her own hand into the air around him, she could not feel anything. She had expected to meet resistance. An invisible balloon skin. She groped around Bobby, but could feel no substance from which to peel him away. He was breathing, his lungs swelled beneath her touch, but still he said nothing.

  “Eeeuuuhh!” shrieked Sherree. “How can you put your bare hand out there? What if the vampire touches you?”

  Lacey shuddered. The vampire was there, of course. No doubt he was taking pleasure in this; it was, after all, the first entertainment he had had in a long time. But somehow she did not think that her hand was going to encounter his slime.

  Her hand encountered nothing at all.

  Lacey latched her hands around Bobby’s waist and pulled, but he did not come free. And he still said nothing. Nothing at all.

  The weird thing was how normal it seemed, as if she had often met boys hanging in doorways and knew just what to do next. If you can’t pull, try pushing, she reasoned.

  So she stepped through the very doorway the vampire supposedly possessed — the doorway Bobby’s body had not penetrated — and then turned around to push Bobby back into the tower room.

  “You got through!” cried Roxanne, getting up. Roxanne hefted the hammer, ready to split the skull of any vampire that got close to her.

  “Run, Lacey!” shouted Randy. He was so proud of her! She was not an airhead after all; he could brag about her now; now Bobby and Zach couldn’t say anything about Lacey.

  But Lacey did not run.

  For beyond the door, at the top of the tower stairs, was the vampire’s miasma of swamp gas. Wet slime coated her face and tried to get in her eyes. Horrible smells and even more horrible sounds filled her nose and ears.

  The sounds were shrieks from another world: a dead world, a world of bodies the vampire had already used.

  He had been here forever, thought Lacey. He was here before the house, and he will be here after the house. He is evil now, he was evil then, he will be evil after I am gone.

  And now, Lacey knew why Bobby was not saying anything. He could not. He was deafened by the screams and the cries and the sobbing of the vampire’s past. He was looking right into it.

  Bobby knew.

  The rest of them were just guessing.

  But Bobby knew what was going to happen to one of them.

  Lacey screwed her eyes tightly shut, to keep from seeing the future and the past, and to keep the horrible swamp gas out of her eyes.

  Nothing would have made Lacey run down the stairs into that oozing, sucking mud.

  She pushed harder and harder on Bobby, but nothing happened.

  Or at least, nothing happened to Bobby. Lacey herself stumbled back through the door, back into the tower.

  Oh! The unbelievable relief of breathing real air again! No smog of corpses, no relics of pain.

  On this side of Bobby’s pinned figure were four other normal human beings, with their normal bodies, circulating blood, expanding lungs, functioning brains.

  “I know what it is,” said Lacey abruptly. She switched off the flashlight.

  Sherree screamed. She had a powerful scream, and one that the mansion seemed to appreciate; the scream was welcomed into the terrible dark beyond the door.

  Randy whimpered. Zach trembled convulsively. Roxanne’s eyes filled with tears.

  Lacey said, “I think the dark is better. I think this tower was meant to be dark. I think the flashlight is an invader. We can’t use it again.”

  She was right.

  For now that dark had returned, Bobby sank.

  Slowly. As if he were at the top of an old playground slide, rusty, no speed to it. A slide for tiny nervous children.

  Bobby puddled to the floor of the tower, like Zach in his Halloween memory. Zach and Randy rolled their friend safely back to the center of the room.

  In the middle of the tower the six of them huddled.

  When Sherree reached out to hold hands, everybody responded.

  Then Sherree said, “I can’t sit like this. My back is showing. Let’s turn around and have all our backs touching, and we’ll face out.”

  “That’s worse,” sai
d Bobby. His voice had changed. It was dull and leaden. It was not Bobby at all; it was somebody who had known suffering and pain, someone acquainted with fear, someone with no hope.

  “Why is it worse?” whispered Sherree. Sherree tried to make herself smaller and smaller, but it was no good; she had spent a lifetime trying to show herself off, and she did not know how to go into reverse.

  “I’ve seen what’s out there,” said Bobby.

  Lacey had not seen.

  Only heard.

  That was enough.

  Bobby’s voice was like cement. “Don’t go out the door,” he said. “Nobody go out the door.”

  Roxanne felt as if the cement were around her feet and some gangster were going to throw her into the reservoir and drown her.

  Bobby read her thoughts. “No,” he said, his voice as drowned as the vampire’s previous victims. “It’s worse than that, Roxanne. Don’t go out the door.”

  Sherree grabbed her boyfriend’s shoulders. “Then how will we get out of here?” she screamed.

  She could just see his eyes in spite of the dark but she wished that she couldn’t.

  “We won’t,” said Bobby.

  Chapter 4

  LACEY’S YOUNGER BROTHER, KEVIN, who was in eighth grade, could not believe how long it had taken Lacey to get out of the house. Kevin dimly remembered Lacey telling Mom and Dad she was going to stay at Roxanne’s, but apparently she was going to Sherree’s instead. Kevin had never heard of either girl and his only interest was being alone in the house at last. Once the house was empty, Kevin had a telephone call to make.

  The telephone call.

  Kevin was deep in his first real crush.

  He had told nobody about the crush, since he had nobody to tell.

  His best friend, Will, had made such a complete idiot of himself last spring when Will got a crush on Lauren that Kevin trembled at the mere thought of following in Will’s footsteps. Kevin was not going to start by buying a huge silver bracelet for a girl who did not even like to sit near him. He was going to start with a simple telephone call.

  He was doing his homework, Kevin would say casually, and he remembered that Mardee…

  Kevin rehearsed the call over and over. Sometimes his voice sounded triumphantly interesting, and sometimes it sounded as if Kevin were the flake of the century.

  “We’re going, dear,” said his mother. “Here’s the phone number if you have to reach us. We’ll be home around one a.m. Be sure to keep the doors locked and don’t watch anything disgusting on television.”

  “Okay, Mom,” said Kevin, who always watched disgusting things on television the instant his parents were out the door. The thud of the closing front door and the clack of the closing lock were music to his heart.

  He kept the TV on very low volume, for company, and looked up Mardee’s number again, although he knew it by heart.

  It took him a full hour to manage the actual call. The sixty minutes were filled with half-dialed numbers, self-scolding and swearing, hysterical laughter and deep despair. Kevin knew that if anybody could see him they’d figure he was a maniac. I am a maniac, he thought, I am insane about Mardee. His fingers completed all ten digits this time and to his horror the phone at the other end was actually lifted. “Hello?”

  Kevin’s tongue felt like a lost mitten. “Hi — Mardee?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Kevin.”

  “Kevin?”

  “From school. Kevin James?”

  “Oh, yeah. Hi, Kevin, how are you?”

  “Fine.” His voice was not fine. His hands were sweating so badly they had soaked right through his jeans where they pressed down. Disgusting. What girl wanted to hold hands with a water faucet?

  “It’s funny you should call,” said Mardee. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “You were?” Kevin was absolutely thrilled.

  “My older brother, Bobby, is at a party with your sister, Lacey, tonight.”

  Kevin was puzzled. “Can’t be. Lacey’s over at Sherree’s.”

  “That’s the story,” said Mardee. “But you didn’t believe it, did you?”

  Kevin had always believed every single thing his big sister said. Lacey was the most straightforward and uninteresting person in America.

  “Weren’t you suspicious when it was Sherree’s house they were supposed to be going to?” Mardee was laughing.

  Kevin did not know Sherree. How was he supposed to be suspicious?

  “Sherree is all body and no mind,” said Mardee.

  Kevin was pretty sure he would remember meeting somebody like that.

  “They’re actually going to party all night in the dark in a deserted house,” said Mardee.

  Kevin was overwhelmed. His sister? Party? “No,” said Kevin. “I don’t think Lacey parties. She’s kind of a —” But Kevin loved Lacey, so he did not say that she was kind of an airhead. But it was true.

  “It’s a party, all right,” said Mardee cheerfully. “Bobby doesn’t do anything on Saturday nights but party.”

  Kevin was rather proud of his sister. It was time she broke out and did something other than study, practice, work out, and be kind to the elderly. Lacey at a party. Kevin could not quite picture this. He wondered if the others would give her partying lessons.

  He wondered what Mardee would be like at a party. Kevin had not done a whole lot of partying in his life, either. Starting with Mardee would be a pleasant introduction. He said, “Mardee.”

  “Yup. That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”

  Kevin had thought they stopped saying that in third grade, but evidently not. He went on manfully, “Mardee, what do you say we — um —” but unfortunately, he was too rattled to remember what he had planned to suggest. The only activity that sprang to mind, he could not suggest aloud on a telephone.

  “Yes!” said Mardee.

  Kevin was awestruck. Would it be as easy as this?

  “I know the address,” said Mardee. “Of course, neither one of us has a car, but that could be the fun part.”

  Kevin was eager to have the fun part.

  “It’s probably a mile if you walk over to my house,” said Mardee, “and probably another mile to the Mall House.”

  The Mall House? That horrible termite-infested porch-rotting monstrosity waiting to be ripped down? Kevin was horrified. Of all the places he did not want to go on a first date —

  “What we could do is,” said Mardee, giggling wildly, “we could scare them. That’s why they went there, you know. To be scared. We could add the extras. The special touches. The really good noises. Tapping on windowpanes. Howling like the wind.”

  “Let me get this straight. You want me to walk over to your house, get you, we’d walk to that abandoned mansion, creep up in the dark, throw pebbles at the window, hide behind those old fallen trees, and listen to my sister and your brother scream in the dark.”

  “Right!” cried Mardee. “Won’t it be fun?”

  Kevin ceased to be an eighth-grade boy striving for adulthood and sex. He became a fifth-grader, dying for Halloween and fake blood, free candy, and screaming girls. “I’m on my way,” said Kevin. “Find a flashlight.”

  “A flashlight!” said Mardee, disgusted. “And let them see us? Nosirree. We’re going in the pitch dark, buddy.”

  “Pitch dark,” repeated Kevin reverently. All sorts of possibilities sprouted in his beginner mind.

  Roxanne held on to the hammer.

  If the vampire came near her, she would let him have it. Roxanne was good at sports, although she had not gone out for any since middle school. The coaches were always after her to be on a team, but Roxanne disliked losing anything publicly. It wasn’t so bad to goof up in gym class, and it wasn’t so bad to screw up on an exam in an academic class. But in a gymnasium when the bleachers were filled? On a playing field when parents and friends lined the grass?

  No, Roxanne liked to stack things in her favor. And in sports, the odds of being an idiot or doing p
oorly were too uncomfortable.

  She hefted the hammer. It felt good and strong in her hand.

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” said Randy from his corner. He sounded belligerent, the way people do when the whole thing is their own fault, when there’s absolutely no way to pin it on anybody else.

  Nobody responded.

  “I mean, how was I supposed to know?” said Randy.

  Whiner, thought Roxanne. Who needs him? She concentrated on the shape of the house. So they could not exit by the door. There had to be another way out, then. She and her hammer would get out.

  Years and years ago, the house must have been handsome. Big and square, wrapped with an immense porch, its wood trim was curlicued, its many roofs covered with slate, and its beautiful tower had once risen above the gleaming house like a ship sailing at sea.

  The hedge must once have been delicately green, enclosing flowers of great beauty and intoxicating scent.

  But the hedge had grown to gargantuan proportions, threatening neighbors and roads. As the ground around the mansion had been flattened to get ready for building the mall, chain saws had taken those frightening black and green trees down, and bulldozers had heaped them like dead bodies awaiting burial.

  The six teenagers had skulked around the downstairs with the flashlight. Anything nice had been pried away and carried off: The mantels over the fireplaces were gone, leaving horrible gaping holes around the brickwork. The beautiful woodwork in the study had been taken, exposing both the framework of the house and the mouse nests. In a butler’s pantry, there had once been fine cabinets with beveled glass doors. Long gone. Nothing left but the holes where the screws had attached the cabinets to the studs.

  The house was pathetic.

  They had gone quickly to the second floor, a dangerous expedition, because the beautiful, carved banisters had been removed. There was nothing to hold on to.

  “At least they left the treads,” Bobby had said.

  “Unless those are just shadows,” Roxanne had added.

  Sherree had screamed happily. Sherree was a good screamer, which would be a useful asset as the night continued.

  But on the second floor a strange thing had happened.