Fatal Bargain

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “It would be a waste of your energy,” explained the vampire. “Although you are welcome to try. We aren’t afraid of having our picture taken, it’s just that we don’t show up on film, Randy. So it’s an ineffective threat.” The vampire smiled widely. His teeth hung cruelly and he scraped them along his chin, as if sharpening them. His eyes left Randy and traveled eagerly over Lacey.

  “Time for you to go,” said the vampire softly to Sherree and to Randy, and Sherree and Randy found themselves going, obeying, as if they were possessions of the vampire in the same manner that the door had been a possession of the vampire.

  The door was open.

  They went through it.

  Only Roxanne and Bobby stood between Lacey and the vampire now.

  The vampire is horrible, thought Roxanne. He’s horrible. He has no right to stage things like this, so we can’t beat him back. But I have a hammer, and steel isn’t stopped by vampires, steel isn’t camera film or car keys, steel will break his bones.

  Roxanne swung the hammer back, savoring the heft of it, looking forward to the crunch of bone when she hit the hideous creature. She threw herself forward. The hammer swung through the air and made contact with absolutely nothing.

  There was nothing there.

  She fell forward, her own velocity carrying her right into the vampire, and still there was nothing there but stinking evil. She fell onto the floor of the tower and the vampire gently retrieved the hammer from her hand.

  How can he react so gently to us, thought Roxanne, when in a moment he will show total violence?

  “It is my way,” said the vampire to Roxanne, “to damage human bodies, but fortunately, humans cannot damage my body. It’s time for you to go, Roxanne. There is the door.”

  She was on the floor.

  His eyes fixed on her and his teeth leaned toward her and she scrabbled toward the door, not quite crawling, not quite getting up.

  The vampire watched with satisfaction.

  Bobby took advantage of the vampire’s distraction and hurled himself at the vampire. His fingers wrapped solidly on the cloak and he ripped and tore with all his football player’s strength.

  And nothing happened.

  He swung there, as he had swung in the doorway.

  And through the hideous fibers of the rotting cloak he saw what would happen to Lacey.

  “The cloak doesn’t come off,” explained the vampire. “You could rip for eternity, and you would just hang in the wind.” The vampire walked toward the door and deposited Bobby on the other side. Bobby’s fingers unwrapped. His feet found the first step. A queer wind blew him forward, escorting him down the steep stairs after the others.

  Already his mind was vague, his thoughts muddy, his words slurred. “Hey, you guys,” he said. Nobody turned to answer him. All five simply staggered down and across, and found the window, and struggled to get out.

  For them, the evening was over.

  Chapter 14

  WHEN SHE WAS WITH Jordan, Ginny was usually acutely aware of her looks. In some ways, in fact, it was more relaxing not to be with Jordan. A boyfriend’s presence demanded so much. Ginny had to worry about lipstick and hair and perfume and clothing and being funny and being sweet and being interesting and being…

  Oh, it was exhausting.

  She liked being in love, but she was also sort of looking forward to the time when she would not be in love, when it would be rather dull and ordinary and she would not have to pour so much energy into it.

  It was most odd to have been in a car together, in the dark, unaware or Jordan. She knew he was there, of course. And yet she did not look at him. Not when they drove up to the horrible old house. Not when they got out of the car. Not when they moved over the ground toward the shadowed building.

  Her eyes seemed caught inside the cylinder of a kaleidoscope. She could look nowhere except down into the pattern, into the tumbling, falling, changing colors.

  Ginny felt herself and her life tumble, fall, and change, and yet there were no colors.

  There was only texture, and all of it black. First it was a square of velvet, and then it was the bottom of a cave. It whirled and turned and became moss and then silk, caked with mud.

  Its curving approach was the most exciting thing Ginny had ever seen, and the most frightening.

  She wanted to run and yet the only direction her feet took was directly into it.

  A smell like a cesspool filled her head.

  She looked up and saw the kaleidoscope of meshing white teeth.

  Usually Jordan could think of nothing but Ginny. Her shape, her scent, her laugh, her teasing, her hair…but he had lost that. Ginny receded from his mind, as if she had set off on some long unknown journey, and they would meet again years from now.

  Jordan knew that his girlfriend was right there, only a few feet from him, and yet he did not think about her.

  He saw nothing but that building: that sagging porch, those boarded-up windows, that tilted tower, those shining slates.

  But there was no moon. There were no stars. There were no streetlights. What could shine on the roof? What was he seeing?

  It was entirely dark, and yet it gleamed.

  Jordan shuddered, suddenly afraid, and that outraged him, because Jordan did not believe in fear. If you had the proper attitude, you controlled any foolish emotion like that.

  Fear possessed him.

  Fear had actually become Jordan, like eye color or height.

  He wanted to hang on to something, to steady himself. He wanted to go back to the car, but the only direction his body seemed to know was forward.

  The porch, he thought, I’ll hang on to the porch.

  He tried to steer his feet to the porch, as if beneath that underhang of roof and gutter he would be safe from the descending blackness.

  The dark was incredibly thick, as if it knew more than Jordan ever would. The darkness took on life and smothered Ginny.

  There was no time for thought, which was lucky, because Jordan could formulate no thoughts about what was happening. He tackled Ginny, as if they were football players. The two of them smacked the ground, and the blackness curled away from them, because they were two, and the vampire could take only one at a time.

  The vampire simply smiled. There were plenty more. No need to fret over a lost victim.

  It was Zach who came first through the window. Zach whose shivering hands pushed at the plywood one more time, and pried open a slot through which he could crawl.

  He was outside.

  He felt that his whole life had been a preparation for this moment: that this was the first time in his sixteen years he had truly breathed. How wonderful the oxygen was. How clear the night. How good he felt. How strong and intelligent. Zach smiled, and he could even feel his teeth: how straight and white and —

  Teeth.

  The word gave him a shudder, but he did not know why.

  He stood on the porch trying to think, but thoughts did not fill his brain the way they normally did. He felt empty. As if something had siphoned him off.

  Notes, thought Zach. I took notes. He found the little pad of Post-its he always carried, and the stub of a pencil. He held the tiny pages up to read, but the top one was blank.

  Blank, thought Zach. I need oxygen, he thought next.

  Get off the porch, he told himself. Get out of this place. Breathe deep. Relax. Calm. Then figure out the next step.

  The vampire of the shutters decided next on the little girl racing away from the car tucked among the dead trees. The vampire loved dead trees. Yes, this really was a wonderful location. He greatly regretted that his home was vanishing under the bulldozers. He swooped upward for a moment, and smiled, preparing for the final, the precious, the wonderful descent.

  Sherree staggered right into Zach as she climbed out the dining room window. “Zach!” she said, as if he were the last person on earth she would have expected to run into.

  They stared at each other. “Hi, Sherree,” sa
id Zach.

  “I’m here with Bobby,” she said.

  “I remember,” he said, and they beamed at each other. They were delighted to possess a fact. A tiny piece of memory.

  “We’re in a hurry,” said Sherree. “I have to get the car. I have to drive somewhere. I’m sure that — I think that — I know that —”

  But she was not sure. She could not think. She did not know.

  She and Zach frowned at each other and examined each other’s frowns, as if peeling away the wrinkles might lead to explanations.

  The policewoman went inside Dunkin’ Donuts.

  She sipped her coffee slowly.

  She nibbled at her jelly doughnut, making it last.

  No static came from the radio clipped to her waist. No stations were busy. No action was occurring anywhere: not in the police department, not in the fire department, not in the ambulance department.

  The evening was dead.

  Darkness swarmed like a million wasps wanting to nest in her hair.

  Mardee screamed.

  Fingers touched her skin.

  Damp stinking air, as if it had life and swamp breath, crawled down her neck.

  Mardee leaped forward with more strength than she had known she possessed and grabbed hold of Kevin’s belt. Kevin, yelling, “Lace! Lace!” reached back without slowing down and yanked Mardee along with him.

  There was a weird, sick moment in which they seemed suspended, as if something had caught them.

  And then Kevin broke free and took Mardee forward with him.

  Zach reached the railing of the wide steps that led off the porch. Another hand was there before him. It was a young man, but nobody Zach knew.

  Police? thought Zach. He didn’t want to get in any trouble. Whose idea had it been to party at the Mall House anyway? Stupid idea. Zach could not imagine why they had come. He could not imagine why they were leaving, either.

  His hand gripped the banister only inches away from that other hand. The fingers faced opposite directions. The other hand was coming in, as Zach was going out.

  The young man said, “I’m looking for Ginny’s little brother.”

  Zach and Sherree stared at him. Do we know somebody named Ginny? thought Zach. I know I don’t know anybody named Ginny. Who’s here, anyway? Zach turned around to look. Randy, he thought. Bobby, he thought. Who else?

  “Ginny’s little brother?” repeated the man. “Did he crash the party? Is he in there with you?”

  Sherree said slowly, “Somebody crashed the party. I remember that…somebody…but…I don’t think it was Ginny’s little brother.”

  It was Lacey’s little brother who raced up on the porch. Zach couldn’t think of the kid’s name. He wasn’t as much of an airhead as his sister, but still, Zach had never had much use for him.

  “My sister!” shouted the kid.

  Right behind him came Bobby’s little sister, Mardee. Zach didn’t have a whole lot of use for Mardee, either. In fact, Zach was beginning to feel quite annoyed that he was spending a perfectly good weekend in the company of so many airheads.

  The porch filled up.

  The party had come outside.

  Roxanne was there, and Randy and Bobby.

  An older teenage girl Zach didn’t know joined the guy looking for a kid brother.

  The place looked like an airport. Everybody racing around trying to find the right gate. They raced around the porch instead. They had the same mental franticness of lost passengers. Where’s my plane, where’s my luggage, who’s meeting me, where did we leave the car, didn’t I have my coat with me?

  Zach had never been to a farm and never seen live farm animals, but he had once read the phrase “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” That sentence was enough to keep Zach from ever going near a farm, let alone having chickens. What kind of animal ran around after its head had been cut off? And why would you want to cut off its head anyway?

  But that’s what they behaved like.

  Chickens with their heads cut off.

  Nine people, darting left, darting right, running down the porch stairs, running back up, clutching one another, barging into one another.

  You’d think our heads were cut off, thought Zach.

  It was not their heads that had been cut off, of course. Just their memories. To have no memory was deeply confusing. They did not know where they were going or where they had come from. They did not know what to do next or with whom to do it.

  And they did not, this confused, blank-minded crowd of nine, look up at the sky.

  Even Ginny had lost sight of the sky, caught up with Jordan and these people circling the porch steps like birds at a feeder.

  It is true that there is safety in numbers.

  The vampire of the shutters could not penetrate so sturdy a crowd.

  He had taken time with his descent, reveling in the silly human mob behavior. Humans were so predictable. They lost their heads and what did they do? They ran back and forth, as if they thought they would find their thoughts lying on one side of the lawn or the other.

  The vampire slid like a migrating bird from one side of the sky to another. Each human attracted him in its own way. Each had a certain something that made the human appealing.

  Which would he take?

  How would the “event” progress?

  It was wonderful to be awake. To have his mind active, to feel his teeth growing, preparing themselves. To have his cloak sift through the night air, instead of being trapped indoors as he had been for so very, very long. The vampire felt strong and able, and he felt eager and excited.

  For several minutes he simply watched. If they had looked up they would have seen his smile. It was quite distinctive.

  But the humans were concerned only with each other. They knew so pathetically little of the night. They knew nothing, of stars, or darkness, or shadows. In fact, they tried to pretend the night was not there. They turned on lights the instant there was the slightest suggestion of night in the sky. As if night were the enemy.

  Night was a friend.

  To me, at least, thought the vampire.

  He waited patiently for one of the pack to wander from the rest, to be sufficiently in shadow that nobody would see the vampire’s descent.

  “I was supposed to be doing something,” said Randy nervously. He was twitching, patting himself, as if a clue would stick out from his shirt pocket.

  “Going home, probably,” said Ginny sharply. “We were out hunting for my brother. My parents are crazy with worry.”

  “We’ll give you a ride,” said Jordan. “Everybody pile in.”

  Sherree loved a crowded car. “We can’t possibly all fit,” she said, giggling. Her parents were very stern on seat belt use. There would be twice as many people as there were belts. “I’ll sit on someone’s lap,” said Sherree eagerly and, just as eagerly, both Bobby and Zach volunteered their laps.

  Randy stood on the bottom porch step, looking around. “I forgot something,” he said, feeling thick and stupid.

  “Your car,” said Jordan, pointing. “You guys are pathetic. I mean, what did you think was going to happen here anyway?”

  “We were going to make it happen,” said Randy. He remembered what he had forgotten. His car keys. He patted his pockets again.

  “I took them,” said Sherree, patting herself. But she had no pockets, and she was holding no keys.

  The night seemed curiously romantic to Mardee. Kevin seemed unexpectedly strong and attractive. She had a sense of being interrupted, as if they had been doing something fascinating and worth repeating. She touched Kevin’s shoulder as if she were afraid of it, and he caught his breath as if he were afraid of her touch, too — as if it would lead to something.

  “Let’s not go with them,” whispered Mardee.

  Kevin nodded. “We walked over, we’ll walk back.”

  They clasped each other’s waists.

  A molecule of memory hit Kevin. “Wait,” he said to the others
. “My sister. Lacey. Wasn’t she with you?”

  “That airhead,” muttered Zach. But he did not say it loud enough for the airhead’s brother to hear. And the moment he called her that, he felt guilty. And wrong.

  As if he knew better than to say a thing like that.

  He caught Sherree glaring at him. “She is not,” said Sherree sharply.

  “I know,” said Zach guiltily. But he did not know why he felt guilty or why he knew that Lacey was not an airhead. He looked up at the mansion.

  It stood dark and formless in the night.

  He knew its roof was a sharp pattern of angles and dips, of slate and tower. He knew because —

  I fell off that tower! thought Zach. I — I — I —

  But how could he have fallen off that tower? He’d have been killed if he’d fallen from that height.

  Weird, thought Zach. We must really have partied. Zach shook his head to clear it, but it did not clear. Something in his thoughts remained murky and dulled.

  Lacey’s brother said, “Are you sure Lacey isn’t with you?”

  Everybody looked around. Lacey did not seem to be there.

  “She must have left early,” said Ginny. “Making her the only smart one in the group.” Ginny pointed to the backseat and began herding passengers into Jordan’s car. They got in slowly.

  Lacey? thought Roxanne.

  Lacey? wondered Bobby.

  Lacey?

  But their thoughts did not come clear.

  They took no action.

  They formed no response.

  One by one, they got in Jordan’s car, giggling, because they were as crowded as clowns, and it was fun.

  One by one, the victims that had escaped the first vampire also moved out of reach of the second vampire.

  The vampire of the shutters was furious.

  Fury made his teeth sharper and his hunger more urgent.

  He retreated. Height helped him stay calm. Height gave him the velocity he would need for a surprise attack.

  The car was just too crowded, and Mardee was feeling too young and too romantic to wedge herself into that group. “Let’s walk,” she reminded Kevin, and they wrapped arms around each other’s waists and moved past the station wagon and out toward the road.