Mostly I tried to not break into a panic-stricken run.
The 1950 Mercury Club Coupé crouched in Mama Samm’s rutted driveway like a prehistoric panther. The chopped roofline, narrow tinted windows, and minimal chrome chasing were swallowed up in the darker than black paint job that would render it practically invisible after sunset—a state I wanted to achieve soonest. Sliding behind the wheel, I counted to seven before turning the key in the ignition and pressing the starter button.
“So what did you think?” Jenny asked as the engine growled to life.
“You know what I think,” I growled in turn as I backed the car up the long, hedged drive toward the main road. “You were right there inside my head through the whole visit.”
She sighed but remained invisible, sitting in the passenger’s seat. “Eventually, you’re going to have to break down and admit that I am not just a virus-induced hallucination. Look . . .” The passenger window rolled itself down. “How could I do that if I’m not real?”
I leaned my head against the wheel and reminded myself that I was doing nothing more than conducting an internal conversation . . . externally. “Some of the by-products of my altered brain chemistry are certain telekinetic abilities,” I announced to the empty seat. “If I can transport my body along the dreampaths, I can certainly fiddle with a car window without tweaking any of my conscious brain cells.”
“Car,” she said as I started to back onto the main road. As I hit the brakes, a gold Dodge Stratus popped into view from around the curve.
“Doesn’t prove anything,” I muttered as I got turned around and headed back toward town.
“Check the answering machine when we get home, Darling. You’ve got a couple of calls that sound promising. They were both long distance so I think your web page is starting to pay off.”
“What do you mean ‘promising’?”
“The first was an invitation to investigate a purported haunting in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The second was from Kansas City, Missouri. Something about a missing mummy.”
“Missing mummy?”
“Uh huh. Couple named Satterfield. Said they had a mummy that was stolen out of their house. Since owning a dead body is not exactly legal, they couldn’t exactly report the crime to the authorities.”
“I see,” I said. “And when did this unreported crime take place?”
“About six months ago. They said they had loaned an authentic copy of the Scroll of Thoth to an acquaintance the day before their mummy disappeared. Really, Chris; you need to do a much better job of cleaning up after yourself in the future!”
“Hey, I had no idea that the scroll would even work, much less have any long-distance peripheral side-effects.”
“Ignorance is no excuse,” she argued. “You still have an obligation to a former client to tidy up.”
I cleared my throat. “Sounds like a pretty detailed answering machine message.”
“I picked up during the call,” she said. “I told them I was your secretary.”
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“Why? Because I’m only a subconscious manifestation of your deteriorating psyche?”
“Something like that. How come you’re still invisible? No one can see you but me.”
“I didn’t want to distract you while you’re driving.”
“Distract me?”
“I’m not wearing any underwear.”
“How could I tell?”
“I’m not wearing anything else either.”
I thought about that. “You’re not real.”
“You certainly didn’t act that way last night.”
I glanced at my watch at the next intersection and decided I had time for my evening run before heading back to the office. Glancing to the right, I noticed odd bits of anatomy starting to materialize in the passenger area.
“Darling, did you know that the French term for orgasm literally means ‘the little death’?”
“You’re not real, Jen.”
“We should be home in another twenty minutes. Then you’ll have another opportunity to prove your silly little theory.”
I shook my head. “You’re not real,” I repeated. “And I have stuff to do.”
“Stuff . . .” I heard her say.
“Can’t miss my workout. Sun’s going down and I’ve got to drop some tape off at the office and review my caseload. If I don’t stick to my schedule, I’ll start blowing off the exercise at every little opportunity.”
“Just remember that you were the one who used the phrase ‘little opportunity’.”
I switched on my turn signal and began humming "Strangers in the Night.”
Chapter Two
The Witch of Cachtice remained on my mind as I jogged into the gloaming.
Gloaming. What a lovely word for that deepening purple twilight between the setting of the sun and the actual fall of night. My state of mind, however, was anything but lovely as skies downshifted from azure to indigo and the first stars of the evening faded into timorous glimmers.
Of all the mumbo-jumbo that the so-called fortune-teller had thrown at me, that one phrase continued to burn in my mind. What else had she called her? Marinette Bois-Chèche? I wasn’t familiar with the reference but she had mentioned the “Loa” and that meant Vodoun or voodoo. I’d have to do a little research from that angle, maybe drive down to New Orleans this weekend.
Or, better yet, fly to Haiti, I decided, loping back up onto the sidewalk as a car approached. Aside from the assumption that the island source material would be purer, I knew there was a vampire enclave down in the Big Easy—reason enough to not make a return visit.
While Haiti had its own supernatural blood-drinkers—specifically the mauvais airs and the mauvais nanm of voodoo origin, and such West Indies imports as the loogaroo of Grenada, the asema of Surinam, and the sukuyan of Trinidad—I doubted that the island had any organized demesne system. The Crescent City enclave wasn’t much on structure either but, sooner or later, every badass vampire wannabe decided to make the pilgrimage and few were said to return. Perversely, I was probably safer in the jungles of an alien nation than the back streets of an American tourist trap.
Mama Cséjthe didn’t raise no dummy.
Unless you count my buying any part of Mama Samm’s sideshow act.
The car passed by and I hopped off the sidewalk, sprinted across the street, and cut across a vacant lot. The streetlights were old and mostly out of order in this section of town, which was why I liked to run here. Even though I didn’t huff and puff anymore, I detested being on display for the neighbors. The only thing I hated worse than jogging out in the open was running laps on a fixed track where the repetitive scenery is slightly less boring than watching the Golf Channel on cable.
A row of decrepit shotgun houses loomed ahead. Their coffinlike silhouettes provided an appropriate backdrop to my thoughts as I considered Mama Samm’s veiled warnings and her troubling reference to Marinette Bois-Chèche.
The “Witch of Cachtice” made sense in only one context.
The ruins of a castle remain today in the Slovak Republic—Cachtice, Slovakia, to be precise. Once upon a time it lay within the borders of Hungary and was known by a different name. It was the ancestral home of Countess Erzsébet Báthory, who practiced the dark arts and came to believe that the blood of virgins would keep her eternally young and beautiful. During the opening years of the seventeenth century, she murdered over six hundred young women, practicing abominable tortures and draining their bodies of blood for her horrific beauty regimen.
Mama Samm’s admonition to “unmask the whore of Babylon before she puts her red dress on” might have made sense four hundred years ago. But the infamous Blood Countess of Hungary died, walled up in her dark tower, in 1614. How could that have anything to do with me?
Other than the fact that the Báthory castle had two names.
Today it is known as Cachtice in the Slovak tongue.
In Erzsébet’s time, the Hungaria
ns called it Castle Cséjthe.
* * *
Five blocks up and one over was the Community of Christ church.
I took a shortcut through a long alleyway, going from late evening to near midnight conditions in one swell foop. As the sidewalls of the alley blocked even the ambient light, my vision shifted over into the infrared spectrum without conscious thought. Perhaps it was a reflexive response to the sudden darkness. Or maybe the thrumming rhythms of the physical act of running triggered ancient predatory presets in my hindbrain. No matter, I went with it. I needed the practice and it made the scenery more interesting.
Imagine humidity as a color: blackish red. With swirls of dark purple like eddies of smoky black light. Mindful of the glimmering yellow splotches signifying the thermal decay processes of rotting garbage, I thought about dropping by to see if anyone was in this late in the evening. I dodged the small red-orange heat signatures of rats scurrying along the alley walls and recalled that the Book of Revelation in the New Testament said something about the “Whore of Babylon.” If memory served, there was even something about a red dress or something. Maybe the pastor would be available for a quick Sunday school lesson.
Maybe we could have a nice friendly chat about eternal damnation and whether the blood of Christ could wash away the sins of those who must take bloody communion from human hosts.
The issues of sin and salvation were abruptly back-burnered: I was not alone.
Two human-shaped openings knelt in the crimson-flecked mists. The victim was a flickering yellow-orange, like a candle flame slowly guttering down. The executioner was a dark hole in the reddish curtain, its flesh too cool to register as a heat signature.
Too cool to be alive.
Wrong shortcut! I decided as it turned a dark, head-shaped emptiness up to stare at me. I whirled and ran the other way.
At the mouth of the alley where the warm darkness shied away from the icy wash of a corner street lamp, I stumbled against a garbage can. I dropped out of the infrared spectrum and shifted back to normal vision.
What are the odds? I wondered, shifting from a sprint to an all-out run. Move to another city, another state, complete change of identity, paper trail erased: a brand new friggin’ life and I run into one of them by accident!
I kicked it up a notch so that I was doing twenty-five, maybe thirty mph.
Once upon a time I had taken up jogging as a healthy pastime. That was in another lifetime. In my present incarnation I ran more to alleviate my boredom than to condition my transforming flesh. Except now I was anything but bored and was literally running for my life: two birds with one stone, as it were.
The sun had been down an hour but the temperature still hovered in the mid nineties. The edges of my vision still registered in the infrared band and the pavement glowed brick red out of the corners of my eyes.
How could I have been so stupid?
If hot summer nights had seemed a soothing balm for my too-cool flesh, wouldn’t it be all the more attractive to those whose bodies had grown eternally cold? In thinking of my own comfort, I had probably raised the odds of this encounter by a hundredfold. I glanced over my shoulder, expecting pursuit. Saw none. Swung my attention back to the front and saw him come floating down, out of the night sky, like a lunatic Peter Pan.
Black chinos, black shirt and shoes, black duster: a very Goth Peter Pan and overdressed for the season, to boot.
I braked, leaving gummy streaks of rubber sole on the hot asphalt. Then I cut to the right, turning down a side street, and picked up speed. Six blocks ahead and two streets over I could see an on-ramp for the highway.
He elected to catch up to me on foot. I think it was intended to spook me; his running just ahead of me, turned backward to converse as if we were participants in a casual stroll—not running at breakneck speed down a darkened city street.
“My, but you’re a fast one,” he hissed with grinning, bloody lips. “I like it when the rabbit tries to run a bit.”
“Do you?” I puffed. Ten more minutes of this and I might break out in a sweat—an increasingly rare experience in my “after” life.
Now that I had the occasional street lamp to manage the “visible” spectrum, I could make out a face—doughy, round features overlaid with a ruddy glow, and overly prominent eyes. His sunburned appearance had nothing to do with the sun and his bulgy eyeballs weren’t tied to a thyroid condition. Rather, he’d overfed just moments before and so he was no longer motivated by hunger.
He was just tidying up; making sure there would be no witnesses.
“What is your name, little bunny?”
Not that he was in a big hurry, you understand. Like many predators, he liked to play with the prey.
“Bugs,” I answered, trying not to “puff” too much.
“What . . . ?” My lack of terror was throwing him a little off-balance.
“Can you say ‘Wascally wabbit’?” I asked.
And shoved him. Hard. He wasn’t expecting it and his momentum carried him down in a tumble that sounded none too gentle for the parked car at the side of the road.
Now I ran as fast as my lungs would permit, inadequate draughts of air rasping in and out of my chest like a fiery crankshaft. I started up the on-ramp. If there had been more than one of him, I would’ve been dead already.
“Lit-tle bun-neeeee!”
And even with only one, it was just a matter of time.
He settled across my back and shoulders like a stack of cold, wet, woolen blankets, riding me like a grotesque jockey. He was surprisingly light, but far too strong for me to dislodge on my own.
“Little bun-nee,” he whispered with a sniggering giggle, his wet lips close to my ear, closer to my neck. I threw myself down, twisting in midair and thrusting with my legs to ensure a long, sliding skid before I stopped.
It hurt!
It would have hurt a lot more if I hadn’t put the vampire between the concrete and myself as I went down. I tumbled to my feet and limped the last dozen yards onto Interstate 20.
Traffic was light: a couple of semis and a dozen or so cars and pickup trucks. Playing dodge-em at 60 mph was better odds than what I had just left behind. As I ran, jumped, and spun across three lanes of traffic, I found it odd that no one swerved. I expected the sound of horns and the squeal of brakes but the drivers seemed oblivious to my presence. Reaching the concrete divider, I risked a glance back.
The creature stood at the entrance to the freeway, directing his attention to the oncoming traffic. He was obviously concentrating, using vampiric mind control to delete my image from the drivers’ consciousness. For all intents and purposes, I was invisible for the moment! He turned his face to the right as I vaulted the divider, clouding the minds of motorists in the eastbound lanes, now.
I took my time as the traffic was heavier and he wasn’t moving for the moment. As I reached the far side I risked another glance back and saw him launch himself into midair, off of the hood of a sedan that had slowed on the ramp. I climbed over the side of the elevated highway, dangling some three stories above the ground as he sailed across four lanes, headed directly for me. A large semi in the fifth lane intercepted him as I let go. There was a squall of surprise and rage heading eastbound with the truck while I prayed for only a broken arm or dislocated shoulder on the way down: either was survivable, while a broken leg or ankle would leave me helpless until he returned. The semi had only bought me some time—probably seconds rather than minutes.
Power cables broke my fall. Three lines of electrical burns across my back and buttocks, a flash, a pop, and I was thrown under the overpass. I rolled, trying to minimize the impact and discourage my singed clothing from bursting into flame. Came up on my feet. Took two steps. Fell down again.
The buzzing in my head diminished after a few moments and I regained some motor control in my left leg. I creaked to my feet and staggered into an ungainly sort of run, barely resisting the impulse to lisp: “Sanctuary . . . sanctuary . . .” in a bad Charl
es Laughton impression.
There were lights up ahead and I was staggering across a parking lot when the creature came floating back down some twenty yards ahead of me.
His clothes were torn, transforming the black-on-black Goth look to more of a punk statement. His face was bruised and one hand bloodied. The semi had made some impression, at least. So had I: “What are you?” he pondered, his googly eyes narrowing.
“I’m what goes bump in the night, Junior,” I growled. I hunched forward, hands on skinned knees, and considered my next move as he contemplated his.
“You’re too warm to be one of us,” he mused, “but not warm enough to be human . . .”
“Sticks and stones.”
“Killing you would be prudent but . . .”
“But?” He was stronger and faster and it was a miracle that I was still breathing, so I wasn’t making plans past the next thirty seconds.
“ . . . You may have your uses.”
Uses? I was beyond fear, now, and edging into seriously pissed off. “What is it with you guys and the black-is-the-only-color-in-my-spectrum get-ups?” I snarled. “If it isn’t black trench coats and eye-shadow, it’s leather and chains.”
“Black is the color of death,” he intoned, saying it like some bad Vincent Price impression. He pulled a cellular phone from his pocket, activated it and punched in a number.
“Color of death, my ass,” I hissed, still trying to re-inflate my lungs. “Color of brain-damaged losers who watch too much MTV and think a lack of fashion sense makes them look dangerous. Too bad Wal-Mart doesn’t carry a Pretend-I’m-A-Badass line; that way you wouldn’t have to accessorize at Dweebs-R-Us.”
He cursed and shook the phone. Between our little tussle and his unexpected ride on the semi, it was apparently DOA.
“Hey,” I said, bracing myself, “even Marilyn Manson moved on to color and spandex: get a clue.”
As he attempted to return it to his pocket, he was off-balance for all of four seconds.
Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II Page 2
