Fatal Bargain

by Caroline B. Cooney

  One-handed, she drove through the dark and quiet town. There used to be a lot more action on this side of the city, but since so many acres had been cleared for the future shopping mall, there was not much here. She paused at an intersection and considered driving past the old boarded-up mansion.

  When the policewoman had been in high school, she had been a cheerleader, and had briefly known the girl who lived in that mansion. There had been parties there. Parties at which everybody seemed to know more than they let on. Parties from which people seemed to come and go as if they could move through walls. And then the girl herself had gone, as quickly and quietly as if she, too, had been walled up.

  When the house was abandoned, nobody had ever gone there.

  It was odd.

  You would think — certainly the police force expected — that the teenagers of the town would see this as an ideal hangout.

  But nobody had tried spending the night in its abandoned rooms. Nobody had spun doughnuts in its pathetic old gardens, and nobody had spray-painted initials in red paint on its sagging roof.

  The policewoman had had a tumultuous high school career herself. There was not much she had not done, or tried, or at least watched. It was one reason she went into law enforcement: She was pretty familiar with the mood or the need that made a person break the law. She was stern now, but she understood.

  There was no traffic. Really, it was remarkable. And on a weekend! Where were all the partying teenagers? The drunks who should be plastered by this time? The moviegoers who should be headed home after the late show?

  The police car edged forward, as only police cars can, taking its eternal time, because nobody can argue.

  But there were no other cars in sight that would mind the delay.

  Setting the awful coffee in the cup holder, she approached the intersection of the valley road and the main downtown avenue.

  The bright red taillights of a single car crept down the valley road and vanished.

  The policewoman wondered whose driveway could possibly be down there. For a moment she waited to see if the taillights would reappear, as a very lost driver backed out of a very unpromising drive.

  But none appeared.

  Truly, the night was dead.

  In lieu of any other action, the policewoman decided to go to the drive-in window of Dunkin’ Donuts. A jelly doughnut, she pondered, or a glazed cruller?

  The police car turned the opposite direction from the twisted tower. The policewoman was not looking in her rearview mirror to see what was happening there.

  But it would not have mattered if she had looked.

  For vampires do not have reflections.

  Sherree was swinging on one of the shutters, as if to hurl herself through the window, through the night, and come to a safe landing miles away.

  The laugh shivered through the cracks in the plaster and came up through the cracks in the floorboards. It lay in the attic and it slid off the roof and it collapsed in the basement.

  The laugh wrapped them like a gift box.

  Except that the laugh was evil.

  “Do vampires laugh?” said Zach. Zach did not sound as if he would ever laugh again.

  “Vampires laugh,” said the vampire, “when they have a victim in sight. Other than that, it is quite rare.”

  The shutters clattered.

  All their little wooden slats clapped.

  Sherree slid down from the shutter to which she had clung and fell in a heap on the floor. A second vampire entered the tower.

  Chapter 11

  TWO VAMPIRES, THOUGHT LACEY.

  It was beyond thinking about. She seemed to have no mind left. She could draw no conclusions and take no action. She could only stare.

  The first vampire — Lacey could not stop herself from thinking of him as their vampire — was so much more cloak than this new one. This new one was gelatinous, sticky and dark like molasses dripping on a floor.

  Once when Lacey was quite small, she and her father had been working in the garden, only to push the sharp edge of a shovel right down into a ground wasps’ nest. There had been a very brief moment in which wasps had zoomed out of their hole, circled once, and then attacked Lacey and her father. Lacey had not even known what a wasp was, but she knew enough to run.

  Her father scooped her up as he fled, and they flew like rockets to the back door, slamming it against the buzzing horrors that followed them. Between them, Lacey and her father got eleven wasp stings.

  We’ve found a vampires’ nest, thought Lacey. We pushed the sharp edge of the shovel down into the ground where vampires live.

  What had really happened to the families who had lived in this house? Had they actually moved away? Or had something truly terrible happened to them? Had they hung wallpaper on a wall, only to learn who lived behind it? Had they dusted a shutter only to find the dark ooze of evil coming off on their innocent hands?

  Tear it down! thought Lacey. Tear this house down! This house must be ended. Once the house is gone, these vampires must surely also be gone.

  Facing two vampires was infinitely more terrifying than facing one.

  Their vampire stood by the door he possessed. The new vampire blocked the shutters. Beyond him, since Sherree had yanked open all the shutters, the night sky was exposed. It was black. Nothing hung there, not a star, not a distant plane. Only blackness.

  The vampire had told the truth. Inside this house, night would last as long as he needed it to.

  Perhaps the house would never be torn down; perhaps the vampire could even control time, and the time to build the shopping mall would never come, and the time for rescue, and the time to go home — these would never come, either.

  Zach and Roxanne kept swiveling their heads. They seemed to think as long as they kept an eye on each vampire, nothing could happen.

  The vampire who had emerged from the shutters eventually stopped laughing. The laughter had poured out of him like water from a faucet, and Lacey had wanted just to turn him off, like a faucet, and be done listening to his noise.

  Sherree, whose flesh the new vampire had brushed, kept making faces and gagging and crying, “Eeeeeuuuuuuhhhh!”

  Bobby stared out the window, as if expecting somebody else to come in, some shape or horror not yet envisioned.

  Only Randy seemed untouched by the new circumstance. He, after all, could not be prey. The rest were now, as the vampire had said early in the evening, simply small animals about to be taken by larger ones. But Randy was out of the running.

  The vampires did not seem to be friends. Perhaps vampires did not have friends. And although they had long resided in the same house, one living between the floors, and the other living between the shutters, it seemed that they had not met in many years. Their schedules, it seemed, and their need for nourishment, did not coincide.

  For the second vampire was starving. He had been closed up, he said, for a long, long time.

  Zach said, “You’re the one who peeled my fingers off the sill, aren’t you?”

  The vampire was pleased to be recognized.

  “Eeeeuuuhh, he touched you, too?” said Sherree. “Eeeeuuuhh, this is so sick.”

  Roxanne suddenly giggled. Sherree kept adding touches of human reality. It gave Roxanne a divided sensation, as if she had been split down the middle like a piece of pie: She was half in the vampire’s world and half in Sherree’s.

  This is not real, thought Roxanne. This is either a really weird party or a really weird nightmare, but this is not real. It relaxed her greatly to reassure herself that this was not real.

  “Why did you do that?” said Zach.

  “I didn’t expect to be awakened,” said the new vampire. “Naturally I was annoyed to find human fingers all over my shutters. But now that I am up, I recall that it was time anyhow. Our building will be removed from this world in only a week. I have things to do. A new home to find. A nest to build.”

  The old vampire nodded glumly. “They are wiping out our habitat
s.”

  Zach burst out laughing, a response that obviously pleased him, because it sounded normal and in control. “You sound like environmentalists,” said Zach. “As if we should preserve a forest for you. Or at least a cemetery.”

  The new vampire looked with distaste at Zach. (Zach felt this was probably the best way to be looked at by a vampire.) “You allow them to speak like this in your presence?” the new vampire said to theirs. “This generation is most unpleasant. They have no reverence for the old ways.”

  Their own vampire smiled. “They will,” he said. His soft eyes landed especially on Roxanne, who had been pretending this was a bad dream.

  “By dawn,” whispered the vampire, looking so deeply into her eyes it felt as if he could see down into her throat, “they will have respect for us again.”

  Both vampires were lost in thought over this probability.

  “No, we won’t,” said Lacey. “I don’t know where on earth you could get the idea that anybody would respect you. We all despise you. So there.”

  The vampires regarded Lacey steadily.

  Then they faced each other. “I would like to finish up in here all by myself, if you don’t mind,” said their vampire. “But there is no need for you to go hungry. You need only slip outdoors. There are more humans waiting in the yard.”

  “Just standing there?” said the shutter vampire. “Waiting to be taken?” He rubbed his bones together. They clacked. They sounded just like the shutter slats.

  Lacey thought perhaps they were the shutter slats. No wonder the previous occupants of this house had been so weird. Shutters made of vampire bones.

  “Why is the house suddenly so popular?” mused the shutter vampire. His eyebrows were hairy and pointed, like fur-trimmed church windows.

  “My understanding,” said their vampire, “is that younger humans enjoy being frightened. It’s the age, you know. Sixteen. Dangerous. To them, of course. Not us.”

  The second vampire smiled so broadly that his teeth seemed to circle his skull. “How touching,” he said.

  “Precisely.”

  “I shall be off, then,” said the second vampire. “I must plunge in,” he added. He liked this turn of phrase, and he watched the teenagers as each one slowly understood the pun — what the plungers were, and into what they plunged.

  But the vampire of the shutters did not go out of the window yet. Instead, he studied the six with a sort of melancholy, a kind of deep longing. “You aren’t really going to let five of them go, are you?”

  The first vampire nodded.

  “I suppose that was a promise?” the vampire of the shutters said sadly.

  “It was merely my promise,” said the first vampire. “You didn’t make it.”

  Mardee had had it.

  First of all, even though they could see the Land Rover right there, they could not reach the vehicle. It was surrounded by these stupid fallen trees. And they weren’t little piddly Christmas trees you could just drag off. They were immense, as big as ranch houses. How on earth had the others gotten that vehicle in there, anyway?

  Mardee snagged her legs and her ankles and her hair in every single hemlock branch there was.

  Kevin, of course, was unscathed.

  I will never associate with a boy again, Mardee told herself.

  Mardee’s brother, Bobby, was a total annoyance in her life. His friends and teammates were even more annoying. Given this depressing exposure to the opposite sex, Mardee had never been willing to give boys much of a chance. People said things looked up after eighth grade, and boys became human, but Mardee had seen no signs of this in her brother.

  So here she had taken a chance on Kevin, because he had such a sensible sister — Lacey — and all Kevin would do was laugh at her, accuse her of screaming, and lead her into thickets of scraping, vicious, dead trees.

  “You said on the phone,” Kevin reminded her, “that we would come over here and make noise and frighten the kids inside.”

  “The noise,” said Mardee frigidly, “came from inside. It was probably your very own sister, whom you are deserting.”

  “Deserting,” said Kevin, delighted with the pun he was about to utter, “in order to have dessert. Come on. Let’s go get ice cream. Nobody’s here.”

  “Have you forgotten what just happened?” shouted Mardee.

  Kevin stared at her, genuinely surprised to be yelled at.

  And Mardee saw that, truly, Kevin had forgotten what had just happened. He did not remember the wet slimy mass that had slid past them, holding some terrible sobbing burden in its grasp. He did not remember the terrible force of its wake, the sucking wind that had yanked Mardee in through the window. He could no longer hear the moaning and the weeping that Mardee had heard coming all the way out of the earth, out of the soil, out of the cellar, out of the ages. He did not remember the cruel horrid laughter that sprang like opposite choruses of evil from the sky and the ground.

  He had forgotten.

  He was just a teenage boy, equally inspired by food or girls.

  “Let’s sit in the backseat of the Land Rover,” said Kevin, leering.

  Mardee favored him with a look of absolute loathing, but Kevin, being as stupid a boy as her brother, Bobby, misinterpreted Mardee’s look as one of agreement: that backseats and kisses were tops on her list, too.

  Boys, thought Mardee.

  She was getting in the Land Rover, all right, and then she was slamming the door and staying nice and safe in there until everybody came out from whatever ghastly party they were having inside and she didn’t care what dumb old Kevin did. He could have all the ice cream on earth for all she cared.

  Mardee climbed over the last interfering branch and grabbed the handle of the Land Rover.

  Teeth glittered through the window.

  Roxanne was the first to understand this new piece of information. “You mean, even if we get out,” shrieked Roxanne, “even if you take only one of us, this other vampire can have more?” She could not believe this. A deal was a deal. What kind of game were these vampires playing?

  “Perhaps if you make your choice more speedily,” said the vampire, “my guest will still be busy with the humans in the yard. Perhaps in that case, you will indeed escape notice by my guest.”

  Who on earth could be in the yard? thought Lacey. Who else was dumb enough to be here at this hour? In this terrible dark? With the horrible smells and atmosphere?

  Lacey took swift steps to the open shutters. Grabbing the window rims, and leaning into the fresh air, she screamed out the window. “Run!” she shrieked, calling on every molecule of lung power. “Get out of here!”

  There was no sound anywhere.

  Not in the tower, not in the yard.

  “Go away!” screamed Lacey. “Quick! Run!”

  The vampire of the shutters said gently, “You are clearly not, although a human yourself, a student of human nature, my dear. When told to run, human beings inevitably stand still. When told to be afraid, human beings inevitably become curious instead. What you have done, of course, is merely to whet the appetites of those below.” The vampire smiled, this time courteously covering his mouth. “And my appetite, too, of course.”

  He sifted between her and the windows. Lacey did not flinch. She would not give him the satisfaction.

  The vampire evaporated, slowly, his eyes going first, then his flesh, then his teeth, and at last his wrappings.

  He drifted out the window rather like smoke from a fireplace, slow and thick and gray.

  “And now,” said their vampire, “let us finish up.”

  Chapter 12

  THE VOICE THAT SCREAMED from the tower was his sister’s. It was Lacey.

  Airhead Lacey was, after all, partying in the mansion.

  Kevin had never heard her scream like that. He had never heard anybody scream like that. The ferocity in her voice — Run! Get out of here! Quick! — stunned Kevin.

  He could not worry about the person sitting in the Land Rover, w
hoever he was. He could not even worry about Mardee.

  Mardee had actually fainted. Kevin had been thrilled. He had not known this happened in real life, either — girls passing out lightly in their boyfriends’ arms. Of course, Mardee despised him, but on the other hand, he had caught her before she fell all the way, so perhaps that would count for something.

  But he forgot Mardee. His hands didn’t forget; they yanked her vertically to her feet, although this was not the proper reaction for dealing with faints. She became a simple burden to him, a thing to haul along, like schoolbooks down a hallway.

  “Lace!” he shouted. “Lace!” Nobody answered. The house was silent.

  Mardee had not actually fainted, just dropped down so that the vampire in the Land Rover would not see her so clearly. Now, clearly, she could see it was not a vampire at all, but some boy with bad teeth. Randy must have loaned his car to the guy.

  This was definitely not the place for a girl with an overactive imagination. Mardee shook her head to clear it of idiocy. Perhaps it was Kevin’s influence, seeing all this nonsense.

  “We’ll be out of your way in a moment,” she said to the driver of the Land Rover. The guy gave her the creeps.

  “She’s in there,” whispered Kevin, staring up at the tower.

  Shutters banged. Down here among the dead trees there was no wind, but the wind at the rooftop must have been strong, for blackness seemed to dip and sway along the windows, as if the sky itself were casting a shadow on the mansion, and then taking it away.

  “I heard her!” whispered Kevin.

  “Told you so,” said Mardee.

  Boys drive me crazy, thought Mardee. I said to Kevin, I said, Lacey’s in there. Your sister. And he said, Nah, let’s go get ice cream. I said, Kevin, there’s a vampire in there. And he laughed at me. Now he’s acting as if he’s the only one who noticed that something is wrong!

  Kevin tried to find his way out of the fallen trees. “I’m coming, Lacey!” he yelled.

  “Alternatively,” said the vampire, “you may all stay.”

  The room was absolutely quiet.

  “After all,” said the vampire, “if you each wish to experience this event, who am I to deny you?”