Fatal Bargain

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Nobody could be bothered looking into the empty bedrooms or trying out the damaged window seat.

  Another, steeper set of stairs coaxed them up again.

  Roxanne had actually felt drawn, in a sort of reverse gravity.

  The railing was still on this stair, and when her hand touched the surface, it felt warm to her. It quivered slightly, as if wired. They had found themselves getting in line to go up, waiting impatiently, staring with fascination at the lifting feet of the kids ahead of them, and then setting their own feet neatly in the spaces just vacated.

  It had been a strange, breathless parade.

  Randy had gone first. It was his hand that closed on the knob of the single door at the top of the stairs. His hand that swung the door out. His foot that crossed the threshold into the tower.

  The tower was very high, Roxanne knew.

  Although the house was in a valley, the tower was visible from far away. During Roxanne’s lifetime, various owners had either kept the shutters tightly closed over the tower’s many windows, or entirely opened. With shutters closed, the tower looked angry, like a weapon poised. With shutters open, the tower seemed hungry, its flaps checking the air for food.

  Once up in the tower, the six made a strange discovery. Not only did the tower have shutters on the outside, it had them on the inside. The inner shutters were tightly closed, giving the room a strange inside-out look.

  Roxanne’s hands memorized the hammer. Three textures: handle, slipcovered in corrugated rubber for a better grip; shaft, smooth cold metal; head, strong with sweeping claws.

  This tower — how many feet above the ground was it? Too many to jump, that was for sure.

  Randy was still busy apologizing. He sounded worried that he might get a demerit.

  “Somebody has to rescue us!” said Sherree hysterically.

  Lacey considered the possibility of rescue.

  She thought of the Land Rover, parked so invisibly in the sheltering maze of fallen hemlocks.

  Nobody would see it.

  She thought of the careful excuses made to trusting parents.

  Nobody would worry.

  She thought of the little pile of cell phones inside the Land Rover. Randy had insisted that things would be scarier without the comfort of instant communication. Everybody had regarded him with suspicion. She herself had stuck up for Randy, being the first to set a cell phone on the floor of the vehicle. Everyone had followed her example.

  Nobody would be telephoning in or out.

  “Call somebody, Randy!” cried Sherree.

  Why, Roxanne asked herself, if you had to be imprisoned with somebody, must it be a brainless goop like Sherree? “Every single phone,” Roxanne pointed out, “is sitting uselessly in the car.” She glared at Randy.

  “I’m sorry, okay?” said Randy. “I mean, I didn’t know this was going to happen, did I? You can’t get mad at me over this. How was I supposed to know?”

  “Keep whining,” said Zach. “Because you’re right. Tonight you won’t win any points in your popularity collection game, Randy. The minute we get out of this, we’re never looking at you again.”

  “We’re not getting out of it,” said Bobby.

  Zach glared at him. “You sure gave up easily. Get a grip on yourself, Bobby. We need to talk about what we know about vampires. What exactly do they do? What exactly will happen to us if he gets us?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that!” wailed Sherree.

  “If we gather enough knowledge,” said Zachary, “we’ll know the vampire’s weaknesses.”

  Sherree burst into tears. “I don’t want to know anything about vampires! I want to go home!”

  Nobody said anything to that. They all wanted to go home.

  “I like my life,” added Sherree.

  They all liked their lives.

  “We’re wasting time,” said Zach. “List the vampire’s weaknesses.”

  Bobby laughed.

  Lacey said softly, “The vampire’s weaknesses don’t count. Our own weaknesses are the ones that matter.”

  Chapter 5

  IT WAS A NEW sound. A completely different sound. Almost gentle. A tribal sound, like something from a film on ancient Africa, of hollow logs or old drums.

  Lacey had heard the sound before, just as she had smelled the smell before and seen the cloak before.

  I have had other lives, thought Lacey. Were they terrible? Was I as afraid during those lives as I am now? Was I glad to pass into other worlds? Did I go with as much pain and fear as I will this time?

  The gentle thrumming continued.

  It was precise and rhythmic. It reminded Lacey of somebody absently plucking the bass string on a guitar.

  It was a waiting sound: background music, rhythm before the action begins.

  Sherree laughed hysterically. “It’s the vampire!” she said. “He’s knocking.” Sherree turned to open the door. “Come in, come in,” she sang, like a lost opera soprano. Or a young girl losing her mind.

  Only some of the vampire came in. Cloak, rather than teeth: Stench, rather than hands.

  Lacey bit her lip, which made her think of teeth, and other, future bites, and she put both hands over her mouth and shuddered behind the wall of her locked fingers.

  “Have you made any progress?” said the vampire courteously.

  Lacey hated him for being gentlemanly. This was not a mannerly occasion. She found her voice. “We’ll let you know,” she said icily, in the rudest voice she could manage.

  “You must feel free to take your time,” said the vampire. “I have all night, of course.”

  The cloak evaporated more quickly than before, but his smell was greater and stayed longer. Roxanne had a coughing fit.

  “That’s it!” whispered Zach, wildly excited. “We’ll stall. We’ll bluff. We’ll waste time!” Zach choked in his eagerness to explain the strategy to the rest. “When the sun comes up, he’s out of the picture! I saw that in a movie! Vampires can’t live in the sun!”

  But the vampire’s voice was still among them. He straightened Zach out. “I can make the night last as long as I wish, you see. You chose a sealed house, my friends. Plywood…nailed over broken panes. Light sockets…without bulbs. Wiring…in which no electricity flows. It is always night in this house.”

  His voice went on shivering for some time.

  Always night.

  Always night.

  Always night.

  A shutter caught Zach’s attention. It rattled its louvers as if it were talking to him. Zach nearly answered. Then he stopped himself. Those were strips of wood. Nothing else.

  I’ve got to get out of here, he thought. Before I lose my mind.

  It seemed to grow darker in the tower. The room added shadows and layers. The walls became farther away, the ceiling more distant.

  I have to do something, thought Zach, before we are in total darkness and total silence.

  Somehow he knew that once the horror became complete, nobody would be able to think, nobody would be able to act, nobody would be able to escape.

  His mind tumbled like clothes in a dryer, falling, mindless, knowing nothing but heat and gravity. He could not grip any of his thoughts; he could come to no conclusions; he could plan no strategy.

  All night. Their lives would last all night. Their lives would be nothing but night. Endless night.

  Unless Zach could find a way out.

  “We have to get out of here!” cried Roxanne. “Now! We can’t just stand here and pretend somebody is going to rescue us. Nobody is going to rescue us! Somebody do something!”

  Roxanne clung to the hammer.

  What would happen to the vampire if she swung the hammer at it? Was there anything to bruise or break? Did it have substance or was it some sort of reflection of itself? Did it need — Roxanne could not bear imagining this part — did it need a meal in order to have flesh and skin?

  In her panic, Roxanne pressed down with the hammer. It caught in the crack of the
floorboards. Her body was so clenched with fear that she was gripped by an involuntary spasm, and she wrenched the hammer upward. The floorboard under which the claws were hooked came upward a half inch.

  What’s under there? she thought. Roxanne did not know what houses were made of. Beneath this floor would be the ceiling of the room below. What was the room below? What were ceilings made of? What would be in the sandwich of top floor and bottom ceiling? For a moment, she worried about live wires that could electrocute her should she stab a hammer claw through one. Then she remembered the electricity was off. She actually blushed in the dark, grateful that people like Zach, who were intelligent, did not know what a stupid worry she had just entertained.

  Roxanne looked down. It was much too dark to see anything. She held tightly to the hammer handle. She pulled harder. The strip of flooring came up another inch. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would have made Roxanne stick bare fingers under the floor. With everything else there was to be afraid of, how did she have energy left to be afraid of touching the open edge of a piece of wood? You would think I’d have reached a fear saturation point, she thought.

  But no.

  Perhaps you could always become more afraid.

  After several moments of gathering courage, Roxanne worked the claws of the hammer a few inches down the flooring strip, and pried again.

  Zach touched the shutter. It felt punky. Rotted. Like a piece of tree fallen years ago in a storm, full of insects and becoming mulch on the forest floor. It contained its own damp. It felt as if he could roll it up in his hand.

  Instead, he opened the shutter.

  At first, although he knew he was looking at sky now instead of tower wall, he could see no difference. It was nighttime. There was no moon. There were no stars. No plane sparkled red and white in the sky. No immense beam from a car dealership or a carnival circled in the sky.

  Zach touched the glass window.

  Slowly, he lifted it. It held, staying up.

  He put his hand outside into the night air. The vampire might possess the door, but he did not possess this window! Zach said nothing to the others. Who knew what the vampire could feel happening in his own house? Who knew what the vampire saw? Best not to start loud frantic conversations on the subject of getting out via the window.

  Zach thrust his head and shoulders through the opening.

  The air was fresh and clear.

  He had not realized the extent of the vampire’s pollution until his face was breathing in clean air. The vampire had so completely contaminated the tower they might have been breathing the exhaust of decrepit trucks.

  Over and over again, Zach filled his lungs with the wonderful clean oxygen of the night sky.

  There was no longer a yard around the old mansion. There were ditches and troughs where bulldozers had gouged away shrubs and stone garden paths. The bulldozers had not followed up on their task. Heaped around the ground were dirt and debris mountains. If Kevin had been a little boy, and had had his toy trucks along, he would have had a wonderful time road building.

  “There’s the car,” whispered Mardee. “They’re here, all right.”

  Randy’s Land Rover was a dark color and blended into the fallen hemlocks like a jungle animal into dense leaves. Kevin had not even seen it. There was something terrifying about the way it was parked. Randy must have driven into the Mall House yard, circled, and backed carefully into the immense black branches with their evil stubs of broken limbs stabbing the air all around them. Somebody had had to get out of the Land Rover first and direct him, or they would have been stabbed onto the prongs of the dead trees like meat on a fork.

  The house was sordid and ruined.

  There was nothing romantic about it.

  It had a caved-in look, a place so completely gone, so completely lost, that even homeless drug addicts and mentally ill street people would not come here. The building itself looked mentally ill, its shutters crooked, its shingles curled upward, its roofing sagged.

  The silence around the mansion was complete.

  Life had stopped here. No birds, no small animals, perhaps not even any insects. No heart beat here. No lungs filled.

  Life had stopped here. No flowers, no shrubs, no trees, perhaps not even weeds or grass. No roots dug into the fruitful earth. No leaves drew sustenance from the heavy air.

  The air was truly heavy, as if the weather were about to change. Or as if something evil and unthinkable were passing through.

  Kevin and Mardee found that they were holding not hands, but bodies. As if, should they stand apart, something else would fill that little space between them, and separate them forever.

  On the lower floor, sheets of plywood had been nailed over the windows. The pale plywood made blind eyes against the dark house walls.

  “They can’t be in there,” whispered Kevin. “There’s no way in.”

  “They got in somehow; their car’s here,” breathed Mardee. “Let’s go around the house and see how they broke in.”

  Kevin did not want to circle that house. He did not want to be near that house, or see that house, or even smell that house. Kevin was not actually gagging, but the smell of the house filled him and became part of him, and he felt weirdly older. As if that smell were carrying his body through its life span, and by dawn he would be ancient, used up, ready for burial.

  Kevin wet his lips and regretted it. The smell gathered substance and landed on his damp lips, coating them. He tried to rub it off on his sleeve. It didn’t come off.

  Mardee was hanging on to him with both hands now. Kevin tried to enjoy this, but enjoying anything was impossible under the circumstances. Kevin could not imagine his fastidious, careful sister actually going inside.

  Lacey wants to be popular, thought Kevin. I guess we all do. Her new friends were going in this horrible place, so she took a deep breath and went along.

  Though how anybody could take a deep breath around this house, Kevin could not imagine. Earth and air percolated a vile stench. It was too dark to see the ground.

  The source of the smell must be lying open — a septic pit — a sewer tank — a poison-disposal field. Kevin put one foot ahead of the other knowing he had never done anything so stupid, but doing it anyway. They circled the house and found nothing to show where the others had gotten in.

  “Maybe they didn’t get in,” muttered Kevin. “Maybe they fell into whatever pit it is we keep smelling.”

  Mardee shook her head. Her hair brushed his cheek and he briefly forgot the house and turned his face down into her hair, intoxicated by it. It was satin compared to his own. His was like the tips of old paintbrushes; hers was like ribbons. In the deep darkness he could see into her eyes, the only bright spots on the earth. Kevin forgot the cesspits he had worried about and fell into Mardee’s eyes instead.

  Mardee whispered, “Let’s go up on the porch and see if we can peel back any of the plywood.”

  Girls were supposed to be so romantic. How come he had chosen one who concentrated on things like this?

  I’m wasting time, Zachary thought.

  Zach came from a family in which time was never wasted. It was important to make the best possible use of all time. Zach’s mother had had an extensive program of cultural activities for Zach when he was young; they had always been going to the Egyptian wing of the museum, or the children’s concert and lecture at the symphony. Zach’s father set an example of always having a book on tape should they be caught in traffic or a book to read should they have to sit an extra half hour in a doctor’s waiting room. Zach’s parents saw to it that all summer vacations were Important Experiences and all evening events were Meaningful and Packed with Knowledge.

  Zach counted his breaths, and when he had taken ten lung-restoring heaves, he knew that was sufficient and he had no right to waste time tasting air, when he could be planning an escape.

  By now his eyes were used to the dark and that made Zach feel better; time had not been wasted; he had just been acclimating himse
lf to the dark.

  He was three very high stories up in the air. If he were to jump, he would certainly break a leg. If not a spine. Zach had no desire to be a paraplegic. On the other hand, he had no desire to be a vampire’s long-awaited dinner.

  “Actually,” Lacey was saying, in her methodical way, “we wouldn’t be his dinner. The correct meaning of breakfast is to break the fast, and the vampire has been fasting for a long time now. So we’d be breakfast.”

  “Thank you for clearing that up,” said Roxanne sarcastically.

  Zach actually grinned. Then he studied the roof. There was a sort of gutter around the base of the tower. If he could wriggle out, he could perhaps use that as a crawl space, and inch his way to the roof beam of the rest of the house, which was, of course, lower than the tower. Perhaps he could slither along the roof beam and find his way down to the roof over the big porch. Then when he dropped to the ground he’d have a much better chance of living through it.

  But what if the gutter were as rotten as the shutters? He’d still fall.

  Zach was not a physical daredevil.

  That was Bobby’s style.

  Zach preferred to let others take the risks, while he got the excellent grades, made the brilliant jokes, and led the pack.

  But he did not see any way out of this except physical daring.

  The thought was exhilarating. Zach had been brought up to conquer the world. This was his moment. Yes. It was time. Now he had to take the world by the shoulders and show it what he could do.

  Once I’m down, thought Zach, I’ll get my cell phone out of the car and call the fire department. They have the high ladders. They’ll get the rest out.

  Zach knew that he would not call the fire department. He could not dial 911 and tell them to rescue his friends from a vampire. It was too ridiculous. Nobody would believe him. He would be laughed at. Zach could take anything except being laughed at. People would point at him, and chuckle, and call him names. That’s the kid who thought there was a vampire in that old shack they’re tearing down to build a mall, isn’t that hysterical?

  The tower’s exterior shutters banged eagerly, a drumroll for whatever happened next.