by Steve Niles
“But no dice,” he went on. “Instead we found a woman who had to be in her fifties, on her bed with two guys who were at least a decade older. They were all white, one of the guys was skinny as a bean, and the other was like Marlon Brando or Orson Welles, you know, the size of a small continent and all gravitas, saying, ‘Excuse me, but is there something illegal about this?’”
Stella started to grin. “Oh, no,” she said. “They were—”
“She was on her hands and knees, with the little guy behind her and the big one in her mouth. Or at least he had been until we bashed in the door.” He laughed, too, remembering the look on the big man’s face, stern and serious but confused at the same time, as if he might have broken a law he didn’t know about. “What’s worse is the agents who came in the back door. They walked right into another room, where twelve other guys were sitting around in their Skivvies, waiting for their turns. One of them tried to run, but he had his boxers down around his ankles and he tripped and landed on his face. It turned out the Special Agent in Charge had transposed two numbers in the address, and the real terrorists—who were really just a pack of idiots with delusions of grandeur—were cowering in their basement across the street the whole time.”
“So you caught them eventually?” Stella asked.
“Sure, once the SAIC figured out his mistake. He apologized profusely to the woman, who didn’t bother to put any clothes on the whole time we were trooping around inside her house. When he told her we were going to go raid her neighbors’ house, all she said was, “I did them once. They weren’t very good, young and kind of nervous. I prefer men with a little more maturity under their belts, if you know what I mean.”
Stella almost did a spit-take. Wouldn’t that have been something special for the maid service to clean up.
“Barrow is provincial compared to the big city,” she said when she could control herself. “The biggest sex scandal Eben and I ever had to deal with was when a couple of pipeline roughnecks brought in some mail-order Russian brides and set them up in a brothel. The hookers we already had in town complained because the Russians were undercutting them on price, and we had to shut them down.”
Andy polished off the last of his chicken. Stella’s bottle was nearly empty, too. She had a few more in her room. If she got hungry, though, she could easily tear off his head and drink him, and there wouldn’t be much he could do about it. “Stella, do you ever think about…you know…” He touched his own neck. “I mean…”
“You mean do I think about feeding on you? Or people in general? Absolutely, it crosses my mind. I had the same question, the first time I spent any real time with Dane. The real answer is that some of us can control our hunger. When your wife was alive, you probably saw other women you were attracted to, ones you wanted to be with, right? But you chose not to act on those impulses, on that hunger. Same way you might want a big burger dripping with grease, or deep-fried chicken instead of roasted. But you do what’s best for you. We’re all bundles of lusts and hungers, but we have free will, too.”
She took another drink, swallowed, smacked her lips together.
“But to answer your question, yes, fresh is better.”
She then looked at him dead-on with the black eyes of a shark. Andy’s stomach clenched as he met her gaze, unable to tear away, completely defenseless.
Fresh is better.
“Maybe we should get going soon,” she finally said.
“Yeah…” Andy eventually replied, still staring, disturbed. “Let me finish up. Give me a few.”
Stella stood, turning her back to Andy.
The thought that was worming its way from the back of his brain since the journey began now came to the forefront—maybe, just maybe, despite all of the trust and assurances of John Ikos, this road trip idea might have been a colossal blunder.
A life-threatening mistake.
27
DANE FELT EYES on them almost as soon as they crested the hill and started the long sweep into the valley.
The sensation unnerved him, although he fully expected it. If the structure below was what they believed, the vampires would have security all over the place. His main worry was that he or Eben might somehow be recognized, in which case their whole reason for coming would be utterly finished before it could begin.
The smell of blood was strong.
“We need to get in, need to figure out what the lay of the land is,” said Dane. “To fit in we might need to feed. You understand that, right?”
“Yeah,” Eben said, with resignation. “I get it. It’s just that it sickens me, the whole idea of the place.”
“That’s why we came, right?”
“That’s why we came.”
They parked in the lot and left the car. Before they reached the mill door they had seen the others use, it opened and an old man stepped out. He wore a leather barn coat against the cold and a cap with earflaps and boots that would have been at home in a stable, and his grizzled skeletal face was split in a grin that gave him the look of an elf gone to seed and at least half feebleminded. He said something in Norwegian, in a voice that sounded like his throat was filled with ground glass.
“Do you speak English?” Eben asked him.
“Oh, English, yes sure,” he said. His accent was so thick it was hardly an improvement.
Dane took a deep sniff. The smell of vampires was everywhere, but this guy was not one.
“You are Englishmen?” he asked.
“Canadian,” Dane said quickly. Safer that way, and not just because most of Europe had decided to dislike the U.S. these last few years. He and Eben both had their own reputations in the vampire community, but everyone knew they were American.
“Ahh, we have many Canadians who come here,” the old man said. He beckoned them closer. “Come in, come in. Your teeth, please, show your teeth.”
Dane and Eben opened their mouths, displaying fangs. The old man bent forward and twisted his scrawny neck and looked in their mouths. “Yes, yes, good, yes sure,” he said. “Come in. I am Esa. Esa Immonen. This is of myself and Anu, my wife Anu, this mill.” He turned and started toward the door, Dane and Eben following.
The door was wooden, easily three times the old man’s height, but it swung open at a touch on silent, lubricated hinges.
When it did, the stench smacked Dane in the face.
Bug eaters.
People who had been turned but hadn’t yet finished the change. They would become vampires, sometimes in a couple of days, sometimes a little longer. Until then, they lived under the thrall of those who had turned them.
The mill was a false front.
Once they were past the front room, where the saws did their cutting, the old man’s wife Anu welcomed them to something that resembled a bar or nightclub more than a sawmill.
They came into a large room filled with rows of rough wooden benches and tables that could have seated a few hundred, illuminated by flickering kerosene lanterns hung on the walls and a few fat candles sputtering on the tables. Forty or fifty bug eaters sat at the benches, some nodding like heroin addicts, others raving, twitching, breaking into pieces the insects Anu shook from pails onto the big tables and greedily shoving the bits into their mouths.
The old woman had a face that could have been carved from a tree root, brown and gnarled, and her back was hunched, but her hands were quick and she showed even, white teeth when she laughed. Dane recognized the irony of her name being so similar to Ananu’s—Dela must have as well.
“Not for you, this,” Esa said in his broken English, pushing at Dane and Eben. “For you below. Enok’s house. Below!”
Did he just say what I thought he said? Dane thought. Oh no.
With a hand on each of their shoulders, he guided them between the rows of bug eaters—pathetic creatures, Dane thought, embarrassed at the memory of his own such period—toward a staircase leading down. He put a hand on the heavy wooden banister, just below a newel cap carved in the shape of a demon so
realistic that Dane almost expected it to bite the man. Then he realized that the balustrades were carved snakes, not simple poles, alternating between head up and head down.
The walls of the stairway were of the same dark wood, but without carvings that Dane could see from here. A single lantern hung on the landing, halfway down.
The scents of blood and bloodsuckers wafted up from below. “For you it is below!” Esa said, cackling.
“Okay, we get it, we’re going down,” Eben growled, shaking off the man’s clutching hand. He started down into the darkness, with Dane close behind. Vampires didn’t need a lot of light, actually found the dark comforting, and it was obvious even from up here that there were far fewer lanterns and candles below. As they descended, Dane glanced up to see Esa and Anu watching them go, both laughing insanely.
“I hope this isn’t some elaborate trap,” Dane whispered.
“I don’t think so,” Eben replied. “It smells like an abattoir.”
“Well, that’s what we’re looking for.”
“What was he talking about, though, when he said ‘Enok’s house’?”
“Oh, you don’t want to know.”
“What do you mean?”
Dane started to answer, but they had reached the next level. The staircase continued to wind down and out of sight. Peering over the side, he thought he could make out another seven or so levels before they blended together in the dark. Place is huge, he thought. Deceptive from above. It was like a building turned upside down, built down into the earth instead of up from it.
This level looked more like a nightclub than the rustic beer hall layout upstairs. Dimly lit alcoves held curved benches or private booths, some partitioned by heavy drapes. Here and there were bars, with a few vampires leaning on each one, although the bartenders seemed to serve only the one beverage. “Blood on tap,” Dane observed quietly.
A tall, slender female separated from the darkness and walked toward them, her gait sinuous, as if all her muscles had liquefied. She had long, black hair cascading over her left shoulder, and a black dress cut low in front revealing shallow cleavage. “Welcome,” she said in clear, vaguely European-accented English. “I have not seen you before.”
“First time,” Dane said. “We’ve been hearing about it so long, we just had to check it out.”
“From America?”
“Canada,” Eben answered.
“Not so much unlike Norway, then.”
“Not so much, no,” Dane said. “This looks like a great place.”
“It is. We have dreamed for so long of such a place, but only Enok could build it.”
Enok again. Shit. “We’re pleased that he did.”
“Won’t you please have a drink?” she asked. The perfect hostess. She inclined her head toward the nearest bar, that long, thick hair moving like a curtain.
“I’d love to,” Dane said.
“Absolutely,” Eben added.
The hostess gestured with her hand and let them make their own way to the bar. She had some sort of signal arranged with the bartender, though, because he was already setting two thick cut glass mugs of blood down on the sleek wooden bar top. Dane and Eben sat on leather-covered barstools in front of the mugs.
“Thanks,” Dane said, picking one up and downing it hungrily. Never mind pangs of conscience, he was starved. Eben followed suit, although more tentatively. The bartender, a sallow-complexioned vampire with the build and demeanor of a Hell’s Angel, put up two more mugs.
“So what’s all this Enok business?” Eben asked. “The name sounds vaguely familiar but I’m not sure why.”
Dane studied Eben for a moment. “I keep forgetting, no one turned you but you.”
“What, did I miss something?”
“In a way, yes. I mean, whoever turns you is supposed to make some effort to teach you what’s up, how to get along. But there’s also a kind of, I guess, racial memory that vampires have. It seems to get more diluted the more of us there are, and there’s also been some speculation that early, consistent contact with whoever turns you can enhance it, or lack of contact can dull it, or both. Kind of like the bonding experience with parents, in the first days of life, can alter the brain chemistry or whatever, making a child more or less susceptible to certain stimuli. Does that sound vague?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Good, because it’s all theoretical as far as I know, and I’m no biologist. I’m just saying what I’ve heard and what sort of makes sense, according to my perceptions.”
“And it has to do with this Enok…how?”
“In the sense that if your own racial memory was working at top capacity, you’d know why you recognize the name. Enok is one of the oldest of us, maybe the absolute oldest. And one of the meanest, from what I hear, as well. He turned Vicente, who I believe you’ve…met. Also Lilith, who Stella took care of.”
“She told me.”
“Well, Enok made both of them—two of the baddest bloodsuckers you ever want to meet. I know, you’re tougher than Vicente. But believe it or not, Eben, you are a special case. And just because you beat Vicente doesn’t mean it’s the same situation here. If he is behind all this, then this place is serious bad news. Worse than I thought.”
“What’s worse than you thought?”
Dane had been speaking in hushed tones, aware that vampire hearing was far better than human. But at least part of his speech had been overheard.
His audience looked like a young woman, maybe in her late twenties or early thirties. She had an open, friendly face, with big brown eyes and a cute little nub of a nose over thin lips. Her light brown hair had been hacked short, as if she had cut it herself, without a mirror. Her plain cotton dress looked a size too large for her, maybe a couple of sizes, and there were tears at the high neckline and the right shoulder. “Sorry,” she said, “it’s just that I don’t hear English very often in here, especially on this level.” She stuck out a hand, thin fingers, scraped knuckles. “My name is Sarah Cavalier,” she said. “From Columbus. Ohio. In America.”
“I’m Bob,” Dane said, picking the first name that popped into his head. “This is Charles.”
“We’re from Toronto. Canada,” Eben added.
“Pleased to meet you,” Sarah said. “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.”
“Do you come here often?” A pickup line if there ever was one, but Dane couldn’t do anything about that.
“What season is it?”
Dane blinked, not understanding the question for a moment.
“Early fall,” Eben said.
She tapped her round chin with the tip of her right index finger. Her unpolished nails had been bitten to the quick. “Well, I came in spring. The end of April, beginning of May, around there. I don’t remember the date exactly.”
“You haven’t been out again since?”
Another moment’s consideration, then she shook her head vigorously. “No, I guess not. Weird, huh?”
“Kind of.”
“But I mean, why would I? What could I want that hasn’t been provided here?”
“You have a place to sleep? Shower?”
“There are a few showers around. I sleep wherever, you know. And of course there’s plenty to eat.”
“Of course.”
“And I don’t have to, you know, mingle with them.”
“With who?” Eben asked. Dane feared he already knew the answer.
“You know. People. The humans. I never liked living among them, having an apartment and whatnot. Pretending that I bought groceries and worked nights. Sometimes they brush up against you on the street. Yuck.”
“It’s rough,” Dane said.
“It’s disgusting.” She made a face, then broke into a smile as if she had already forgotten her distaste. “Hey, have you been to the other levels?”
“Just upstairs and here,” Eben answered.
“You want to see?”
“Sounds like you’re the perfect guide,” Dane sai
d.
“Oh, I am. I mean, there are some who’ve been around longer than me. But I’m right here, right? And it’s so nice to speak English again. Norwegian always sounds like somebody about to vomit. Gross, right?”
“Yes. Gross,” Dane said. “Show us around.”
28
“WHERE IS THE VAMPIRE?”
AJ shook his head, then winced from the blow he knew was coming.
The inside of his mouth was pulp. He had been punched so many times that the linings of his cheeks had been ground raw against his teeth—the ones he hadn’t spat out or swallowed. His lips were so swollen it was hard to talk. His right cheek was swollen, too, closing that eye to little more than a slit. He could barely hear with his left ear, and an incessant buzzing sounded in his right one. He breathed through his mouth because his nostrils were clogged with blood and snot.
This time, the guy left his face alone. Instead he jabbed something sharp into the fleshy patch between AJ’s left thumb and index finger. AJ screamed and tried to close his hand but leather straps held it open on a table.
The guy looked like someone who would play a government bureaucrat in a movie. Square jaw, small eyes, neatly combed short brown hair, a football player’s build. High school ball, maybe college, not pro. Like the kind of guy who had dreamed of going pro until he got into college and learned that the guys on his high school team hadn’t really been all that good, so he’d been measuring himself against the wrong yardstick and only then realized that he’d have to have a fallback plan. Better study econ, or engineering, or criminal justice. Then his tormentor found himself in a career and he stuck with it, never really getting over the disappointment that walloped him in the gut every time he saw a pro NFL player on TV or in a magazine.
So he took his regrets out on AJ.
“Let’s try this again. I know you went somewhere with the vampire. Then you came back for your boat. You can have the boat—you could be out on the water in three hours, if you cooperate. But if you don’t…let’s just say you’ll be drydocked for a long time. So…where is the vampire?”
