“Yeah,” James said.
“You married to Deborah Ward?” the guy asked.
“I am,” James said. “Is she all right?”
“She seems to be,” the cop said, handing James a small purse. “But might want to get her some help.”
“And keep her off the streets,” the woman cop said. “Dangerous downtown.”
With that, the woman cop turned the hooker around and pushed her toward the door.
The hooker nodded to James and walked past him into the house, taking the small purse out of his hands as she went.
The cops both nodded to James without smiling and turned back toward their car as James stood there, surprised that the night had finally arrived.
It seemed events had transpired to move his life forward.
Finally, he slowly backed into the house and closed the door.
Then he turned around.
Deborah, his wife of five years, dressed like a twenty-dollar streetwalker, stood there, facing him. Her makeup was almost so thick as to crack and her normally wonderful brown hair had been greased back off her face.
“Surprise, huh?” she said, then popped some gum.
He opened his mouth, but said nothing.
Nothing.
“Let me go take a hot shower, get into my normal costume, and then we can talk,” she said. “Be a sweetie and fix me a Bloody Mary. All the fixings are in the cabinet above the fridge where you would never look. It was a bitch of a night out there.”
With a practiced ease on the extremely tall heels, she turned and headed back toward her closet and bedroom.
All James could do was stand there and watch her ass sway under her tight, short skirt as she went down the hall. That was an amazing costume she was wearing.
Then he went over and turned off the game and headed for the kitchen.
With this, he was going to need a drink as well.
Maybe two. If the night turned out as he hoped it would.
Two
The kitchen of their suburban home was everything Deborah had wanted when they moved in. White modern cabinets, granite countertops, a dark floor, and modern stainless appliances.
The entire house had been remodeled. Some of it to her wants, a lot to his hidden reasons.
On the way to the kitchen he clicked a few hidden switches that would help him with the evening to come.
The kitchen table was custom-made to fit the space and could hold six, but since neither of them had much in the way of friends, that table had usually seated only the two of them. And their formal dining room had never been used.
Just wasn’t either of their styles or their natures to have friends.
James hadn’t objected to anything she had added in the remodel as long as it made her smile. When they were first married five years ago, he had loved to see her smile.
She had been fun to watch.
And they had made love regularly, in all sorts of ways. He liked that more than he wanted to admit.
That had ended slowly over the first year.
James dug out the glasses, the Bloody Mary mix, the vodka, and even a couple sticks of celery from the fridge he hadn’t noticed before. He normally drank beer and didn’t much like vegetables.
He put her drink in front of her chair and sat down in his chair and sipped on his drink, stirring it with the celery.
Since he had spent so much time at the casino lately in the sports book, he and Deborah had taken to eating meals on their own.
Now that he thought about it, the only thing they had left in their marriage was this house. Wow, that was sad.
But it felt more like a fact to him than a sadness. He had hoped for something more. Sure.
But it hadn’t happened.
Shouldn’t he be angry at all this? At her hooking downtown? At her sleeping with who knew how many other men?
A normal husband would.
He tried to think back. He couldn’t remember the last time he had gotten angry about anything. It had been a very long time.
He didn’t even get that much of a thrill with winning a bet and didn’t get angry either with losing. Gambling used to make him feel alive.
Wow, he had become a dead shell in this marriage. How pathetic was that?
He needed new energy, new focus, new everything. Looked like after tonight he was finally going to get it.
After a few minutes, Deborah came out wearing her blue bathrobe and slippers. Her hair was wet and pulled back and her face looked like it had been scrubbed pretty well to get the makeup off.
She didn’t even look close to the same woman who had walked through the front door thirty minutes ago. This was the Deborah he had married.
She sat down and took a pretty good drink of her Bloody Mary, then sat back with a sigh.
“Thanks, I needed that.”
He nodded and took another drink as well.
Then he looked at her. “How long have you been doing this?”
She laughed. “If you mean being a prostitute, since I was fifteen. I was trained by my mother.”
Again his mouth opened and yet not a word came out.
Nothing.
There was just nothing he could say to that as her husband.
Finally, he just shook his head and took another sip of his drink. A normal husband with a normal wife would be furiously angry at all this, at being lied to, at everything.
But he wasn’t.
He couldn’t be and he actually didn’t feel a thing, as she knew would be the case.
She stared at him for a moment, then seemed to finally take pity on him, as he had been hoping for five years she would do.
“Have you ever met a person who just seemed to suck the life out of a room?” she asked.
He nodded. “Numbers of them back in college. There is a guy by the name of Hank in our office that does the same thing at times.”
“You ever wonder where that life goes?” she asked.
He looked into her deep brown eyes and could see her question was serious. She was going to finally tell him the truth.
About damned time. Way too late, however.
“You ever heard of vampires?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Vampires in fiction survive from taking the life force, blood, out of others.”
He nodded. He had seen his share of bad movies.
“Blood vampires do not exist,” she said, matter-of-factly, looking at him and seeming to hold him.
“But energy eating beings do exist,” she said. “They are ancient humans that need the energy, the passion, the life force of normal humans to exist. I am one of them. We call ourselves Primals.”
The truth was finally out.
Finally.
The cop had been right, she really did need help. Just not the help the cop had intended.
“Have you been wondering why you feel nothing anymore about anything and are not angry right now about your wife being a hooker?”
He nodded, going with her. “That has bothered me.”
“I keep you drained of that sort of energy,” she said. “It’s why you took that dull job, bet on sports without any thrill of winning or worry about losing, and why we stopped having sex a long time ago.”
“You keep me drained?” he asked. “Why would you do that?”
“Because for the next fifteen or twenty years, I needed what we Primals call a cow. You, my sweet James, are my cow.”
Damn he wanted to get angry, but just nothing came up.
“What exactly is the function of a cow?” he asked.
“I will not age,” she said, “so for the next fifteen or so years, until our age difference starts to get noticed, you will supply me with a base level of energy, passion, joy, enough for me to survive for weeks at a time without being around others.”
She was taking his joy, his energy, his caring, as he knew she was. As he had known it from the moment he tracked her down and got close to her, let her feel his energy.
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“So why are you hooking?” he asked, sipping on his Bloody Mary.
“Once a week I need the boost, the thrill of sex with strangers, the fear that goes with that sex, the passion of men not used to feeling passion.”
“You drain them all?” he asked.
“In a matter of speaking,” she said, smiling. “Yes. They feel empty, calm, and without guilt when they leave me.”
“So why me?” he asked.
He knew the answer. But now that her truth was out in the air between them, he wanted to hear her say it.
She smiled at him. A cold smile as only a Primal can give, but a real smile.
“Because I love you,” she said. “And I wanted to spend a couple decades with you.”
“Until I die from lack of energy,” he said.
She nodded. “Pretty much.”
He knew that wasn’t going to happen. And it really made him sad to hear her say that. He had hoped for a different result.
“So are you going to keep hooking?” he asked. “That seems like a rather risky thing to continue to do after tonight, now that your name is on file with the police.”
He was actually very glad she had slipped up and her name was on file as a hooker. It would make the next things he had to do even easier.
“I was thinking we need to have your brother come live with us,” she said. “We have two spare rooms. Maybe he and his wife could both come. That would be fun for me.”
He looked at her, knowing exactly what she was planning, but still playing along. “I don’t have a brother.”
“Of course you don’t,” she said, laughing. “I’ll find us one, maybe a couple, and get us a cover story. It will be far more fun for a few years than walking those streets in those heels.”
He just shook his head. So now he was going to share Deborah with two other people.
It seemed time to end this.
He sipped on his Bloody Mary, then looked up at her and smiled. “Ever hear of a group called Libertas?”
Her face drained of the freshly-washed look. Her eyes darted from one side to the other, clearly looking for a way to run.
There was no way.
He had made this house a perfect Primal trap and he had turned on that trap while she was in the shower.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.
“Libertas is a group of hunters that survive on finding and draining Primals such as myself.”
She looked at him, really looked at him. “Are you a Libertas?”
“Of course I am,” he said, laughing. “When I saw you that first day we met in the supermarket, your arrogance of just brushing men and draining them, I knew I could easily convince you I could be a perfect cow.”
Her eyes flashed in anger. But then that anger faded and her skin got pale.
He sipped on his Bloody Mary as she slowly realized what was happening to her. He was draining her energy into the fields surrounding the house. And the house was then feeding him that energy through his chair.
She tried to stand, to run, but it was too late. She didn’t have the energy left in her body for even that much.
A couple hundred years ago, he would have had to fight and kill her in a bloody fashion, cutting off her head and everything.
But with the modern science at his disposal, he could build a trap that would pull the energy from her.
A lot better than cutting off her head.
“How did you keep yourself hidden from me?” she asked, her voice weakening.
“Your arrogance,” he said. “You never thought to look and I played your cow perfectly, didn’t I? When a hunter starts to believe they cannot be beat, then the hunted have a clear advantage.”
She could no longer hold up her head and she slumped to the table.
He could see her clear, wonderful skin start to wrinkle and become brittle just as if she were an old woman.
“And just so you know,” he said. “I loved you as well. And if you hadn’t wanted me to be your cow, we could have had a great and long life together.”
She didn’t have the energy to say anything, but she did acknowledge that she had heard him by raising a few fingers.
He sat back, sipping his Bloody Mary, letting the energy she had in her body pour through the house and into him. For the first time in years, he again felt alive.
He had won the fight and another Primal would soon be gone from the planet. And that was worth a drink over.
He kept sipping on his Bloody Mary, watching as his wife of five years shrunk up more and more.
She now no longer had the capability to even move.
Her energy that was pouring through the house to him would keep him alive for decades to come. Because just as Primals, Libertas also were immortal. Only they did not feed off the helpless, they fed from Primals.
He had been doing so for more centuries than he wanted to remember.
She never knew in five years that while she was taking surface, human energy from him, he was pulling deeper energy from her. More than likely that was why she had decided to go find others. She didn’t get enough from him because he took almost as much from her as she took from him.
It had been a perfect balance.
Many would say a perfect marriage.
Finally, her body broke apart, mostly into dust as the house kept sucking every last bit of life energy from her.
“It was an interesting five years, Deborah,” he said, raising his glass in a toast. “I can’t say you were a worthy opponent. But for a while there, the sex was great.”
And it had been, which should have clued her to what he really was.
Energy between a Primal and a Libertas in sex could be almost explosive, since they fed back and forth off each other, sometimes cycling energy up into mind-blowing events.
They had had a few such events right before and right after they were married, but she considered them only the passion of their newlywed moments.
And she had always considered him nothing more than a cow.
He had known better.
And just as with every time he married a Primal, he had hoped she would love him enough to not turn him into a cow.
But in thousands of years of marriages now, that had never happened.
But someday he would find the Primal of his dreams. And she would not turn him into a cow, not want to turn him into a cow, and he would not end up killing her for her greed.
A fella could only hope.
Across from him, the dust that had been Deborah just slowly settled onto the chair and on the floor.
Every bit of life energy she had was now his.
He finished his drink and went to get the vacuum cleaner.
And to see who had ended up winning that last baseball game.
The Titanic ocean liner barely escapes disaster when it rams an iceberg on its maiden voyage. Sherlock Holmes and Watson know that. The news covered it.
Then two strangers appear to ask Sherlock Holmes an impossible question: Why didn’t the great ocean liner sink?
First published in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit from DAW Books, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg, and written with permission of the Doyle estate.
One
THE HAND ON my shoulder seemed rough, brusque in its rush to wake me. As I roused myself from the warm comfort of my quilts and rolled to focus on the worried face of Holmes, he said “Dress quickly. And for extreme cold. We have visitors here, possibly to take us for a voyage.”
Before my sleep-fogged mind could muster a response, or even a simple question as to where we would be traveling, he turned and left me to the quiet of the late-night hour.
I finished with my toilet and dressed as quickly as I could, for such awakening by Holmes had portrayed in the past a need for haste on a new case. And since my friend had taken very few cases as of late, this new adventure must be extraordinary in nature. That thought had my hands shaking with such excitement that I took two attempts to fasten my ves
t.
As I emerged into the main room, I found Holmes in his favorite armchair, his fingers in a steeple as was his habit when waiting patiently. He had started a robust fire to take the chill from the room and the orange light flickered across his features.
Across from him sat two strangers and immediately I was struck by their strange dress, the cut of their jackets, and the look of their hair. The one on Holme’s left and closest to the door had strikingly blonde hair, green eyes, and a handsome face that showed no scars. He was also clearly the taller of the two, even though they were both sitting. At his feet was a large brown case that had the appearance of being very heavy.
His companion had long, almost shoulder-length brown hair and wore an outer coat that he had opened to the warmth of the fire, revealing on the edges of the coat a form of metal fastener with small teeth running along both sides of the opening. I had read of such a fastener before, but never seen one in use. The man had a dark complexion and seemed to be of Italian or Eastern decent.
I was shocked that Holmes had offered neither of them tea or coffee and was about to correct the oversight when Holmes said, “Oh, good, Watson. Now we can start.” He indicated that I should take a chair near the hearth and I did as he instructed.
He turned to the gentlemen as I sat and nodded. “Okay, please explain who you are, why you are here, where you are from, and what you want from me.”
Both of the men had been staring at me in a seemingly nervous fashion, as if I were someone they had known for a long time, yet were embarrassed to greet. I knew from what Holmes had said that he had kept them from telling their story, even so much as their names, until I was present. He did that on occasion when he felt the need of a second pair of eyes and ears. Somehow, in a standard Holmes fashion, he must have deduced that they had wanted us to go on a trip and that it would be to a cold climate. Even though I had no idea how he came to such a conclusion, I would wait until later to ask him how he knew such details.
Holmes leaned forward in anticipation and for some odd reason I found myself just able to contain my own excitement.
The short, dark-haired man cleared his throat, glanced at me and then looked directly back at Holmes. “My name is Carl. Doctor Carl Frederick. This is Doctor Henry Serling.” He indicated the blonde man, who in turn nodded at both of us.
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