The Vampire Files, Volume Four

by P. N. Elrod

  Just wait, some tiny voice within said, shouting thin against the pain. Wait it out and then you can—

  But I lost the rest as they lurched clumsily down a flight of steps. Nevis nearly dropped me as he struggled to hit the light switch.

  “There, all the way to the back,” he said.

  More grunting, but Upshaw was in good shape from his dancing, and Nevis was strong for all his leanness of frame. They made it without mishap.

  “Here?” asked Upshaw.

  “Yeah. Make sure his arms are over his head. It’ll take up less space.”

  They dropped me. On something unconscionably hard. It opened up whole new frontiers of awfulness. My flaccid arms were stretched overhead like some Inquisition victim on a rack. I’d have been better off with the rack. It wouldn’t have hurt so much.

  “Now what?”

  “Now we go to work. Get your coat off and help me drag this thing over.”

  “You’re kidding. Are you kidding?”

  “No. All the stuff we need is right here. He’s planning to fill it in anyway, I heard. We just do this, and they’ll think he jumped the gun on the work. It’ll have all weekend to set.”

  “But the mess—”

  “I told you, one complaint and you go in next to him. You cost me fifty-two grand, you little shit, so don’t think I won’t. You know how much that woulda helped me in getting the Ace back up and flying? So you shut up and pitch in like a good boy, and I might not break your legs myself afterward.”

  They left me alone. I missed their argumentative distraction. It kept me from feeling the terrible cavern of ache inside my skull.

  I wandered in it, lost and alone as the two of them clattered around, doing God knows what. It was noisy and involved a lot of cursing and grunts of effort. Water splashed, then some mechanical grinding filled the room. They had to shout to each other.

  “More water, another bag!” Nevis bellowed.

  The grinding built in level so as to be deafening.

  Belatedly, my brain came near to surfacing out of its stunned stupor. It shifted snail-like into an actual train of thought separate from the damage. It set up a number of panicked reactions for my body to go into, but for the fact that my body was inert for an unguessable time.

  But that wasn’t real panic. The true internal frenzy began when that first ghastly blob of wet cement slapped over my face to forever seal me in pain-suffused darkness.

  18

  SCREAMING, screaming, screaming.

  I was alive. Trapped inside my body. My dead body.

  Alive and aware, as cold cement oozed over it, layer upon layer, the weight crushing me into a stony trough of a grave.

  Dead and unresponsive to the danger, absolutely unable to move.

  Internal shrieks drowned out all thought. There could be no thought with such gibbering fear tearing me apart.

  Caught away from my earth I had such nightmares as this, but those were softened by the innate knowledge that they were only dreams. My daylight paralysis was part of it, unavoidable but acceptable. This was different, to be fully conscious, fully sensible of every inch of my flesh smothering under the pressure.

  The stuff flowed thickly, and there was no end to it. My face, then torso, it crept over and encased my raised arms, seeped under my neck, filled in the space under my back, buried my legs. The weight piled up, compressing, burying me alive-not-alive, burying, smashing . . .

  The tiger-growl clamor of the cement mixer became distant as more cement poured in, muffling my hearing.

  I had no need to breathe, but the instinct to do so was there, far more potent than any newly acquired supernatural ability, and was the source of my panic. My brain tried to make my body breathe. The lack of response added to the panic, and the cycle began anew.

  Screaming. Mindless screaming . . .

  Until . . .

  Shut down.

  Not a blessed moment of unconsciousness, but a shutting down of the mind. It was still aware of the body’s peril, or what was happening to it, but the emotions had cut off as though someone had thrown a switch. Catch a bird and hold it long enough, and it ceases struggling, waiting in blind dread for what comes next, release or death. You can kill a bird just by holding it. The shock is too much for it to live.

  But I was able to think, to understand. Only dimly, for tiny instants at a time, yet more than some hapless sparrow dragged down by a cat.

  Yes, this was bad. To have the stuff filling your mouth and nose, clogging your eyes and ears. Bad. But it wouldn’t last. It could not last . . .

  A tremor. Very small.

  My foot, the beginnings of a movement. Not much. Just the toes.

  Fight or flight. The choice was flight. To get away. Toes, feet, legs to take me elsewhere.

  I groaned inside. Made a change from screaming. Too slow. I wanted out. Now.

  Focus on . . . what else? Pain in my head? Was it going away? Was I healed enough to escape?

  Felt like an ice pick was jammed into my skull. Maybe I should go back to screaming. Wood did this to me. Upshaw’s Hollywood affectation with the walking stick. Damnation, I should have taken care of him at the start, not wasted time on Nevis’s song-and-dance act. I’d underestimated . . . everything. God damn it. God damn me.

  But not just yet. Not until I broke free of this improvised tomb and kicked their asses up to their earlobes.

  That desire began to erode the fear. And the pain. The ice pick feeling, if it was not going away, was at least becoming tolerable. Healing. I was finally healing.

  Just wait a little longer, a soothing voice told me. Just a little—

  The hell with that.

  Trying to vanish so soon after such an injury was like putting your arm in an automatic wringer. Once started, you keep going until the rest of your body stops it or gets squeezed along for the ride.

  It was all or nothing this time.

  I couldn’t tell right away if I’d vanished. The usual lightness of floating wasn’t there, only the muffled senses of touch and hearing. But I suffered those in solid form.

  Solid. The cement. I’d gone through brick walls before. Not pleasant, but passable. It was porous compared to glass, lots of air spaces.

  Those were apparently suffused with water now. I couldn’t wait until the damn stuff dried.

  I tried pushing upward. It shifted. Was I solid after all? I didn’t think so, for the ice pick feeling was quite gone now.

  More shifting, reluctant, slow. I got a mental picture of myself struggling to the surface like a bubble of air trapped in winter-cold molasses.

  Seemed to be going up through yards of it, which was impossible. The trench wasn’t that deep. It was all in my head. Like the screaming that wanted to come back.

  Then some invisible tendril punched a hole in the muck. The rest of me coursed through the opening and suddenly shot clear.

  I bounced against the ceiling, dropped to the floor, and skittered into a wall, all on purpose, all to let myself know I was free, that I could move again.

  This was how it was supposed to feel.

  I shook and rolled and danced in midair, an unseen whirlwind of me.

  The trauma of such a near miss was still there, though. I mentally twitched inside and out from it. Had too much to handle, needed a way to work it off.

  I turned my attention to the interlopers, who still lingered at their task.

  The cement mixer was off. They stood next to it, probably looking down at the trench they’d been filling.

  “It’s caving in,” said Upshaw.

  “Just a big air bubble,” Nevis assured him.

  Truer words . . .

  “Get a shovel and jab it up and down where he is. That’ll get it out. Come on, this junk’s starting to set. We have to leave it smooth or someone might get suspicious.”

  “I’m getting blisters.”

  “Good.”

  Scraping noises. Grinding. Nevis had started up the mixer again.

&
nbsp; I re-formed.

  The basement was well lighted, though the air was cloudy with choking cement dust, the floor slick with slopped water. The mixer was electric, allowing them to work inside. I’d asked specifically for an electric model just for that purpose. I could have gotten a gas-powered one sooner, but I’d wanted electric to avoid having fumes leaking into the main room above.

  Nevis and Upshaw were out of their tux coats and dusted with the grime of their work, but not as badly as myself. I was soaked through head to foot, liberally coated with whatever had been able to cling to my clothes when I’d vanished. To them I’d look like some mud-monster from the swamps.

  Good, I thought, in echoing agreement with Nevis.

  Neither of them heard my approach. Each had a terrible moment of utter shock, another instant of complete hysteria, and then they were fast asleep. Nothing more than that.

  For now.

  I went to a recently installed shop sink. In the future it would be enclosed in the janitor’s basement closet. It had two spigots, one of which had a garden hose hooked up, providing the cement mixer with the necessary water. I scrubbed my head and hands, working the gritty garbage out of my hair and ears, spitting it from my mouth. It was a job.

  When I got clean enough to function again, I went upstairs.

  The lights were on, nice and steady. If Myrna the ghost had tried to warn me of trouble, she’d been right on the money. Too bad for me that I’d wasted her effort. I checked the lobby, particularly the floor where I’d fallen.

  Yes, a smear of blood marked the spot. Nothing compared to what I’d cleaned up last week, but definitely something that needed attention. A wet napkin did the trick. I shoved it deep into the trash can under some lemon rinds.

  My head was knitted up. I was physically sound again but feeling a very strong fluttering that meant I would be wise to feed before retiring. There was still so much work ahead before I could go to the Stockyards, though—like figuring out what to do with Nevis and Upshaw.

  Then an answer to both problems neatly and diabolically presented itself to my weary brain. I felt an awful grin take over my face, and a tinge of regret that Escott or Gordy couldn’t be here to appreciate the idea.

  Actually, I did have someone I could share it with, but he wouldn’t be in a state of mind to applaud my genius. I’d probably have to hypnotize him into cooperation. Unavoidable, but I needed another pair of hands.

  I tapped on the access door. “Malone? It’s safe now. Come out.”

  He’d followed orders and stayed put, though it must have been a nasty ordeal for him to sit in the dark for so long. Still, it was better than the one I’d been through . . . until I counted in our last conversation. No wonder his teeth were chattering.

  He emerged, money bag still in hand, keys in the other. I relieved him of both.

  Profound astonishment as he took in my ruined and now bedraggled tuxedo. “Mr. F-Fleming, what happened to you?” Tic.

  “I had a little disagreement with your former boss. He’s in the basement. I’m going to need your help.”

  “D-doing what?”

  I fixed him with a look, making solid contact despite the booze I’d given him. He was a perfect subject for this kind of thing, very easily suggestible. “You’ll find out. Just do what I say, and we’ll talk about what to do with you later. That will be all right with you, understand?”

  He nodded in blank-faced agreement and followed me down to the basement. Along the way we picked up a couple of sturdy wood boxes that had held wine bottles. With the dividers removed they were exactly the right size for what I had in mind.

  How much of the next hour Malone drifted in the aftermath of hypnotic haze, I couldn’t guess, but he cooperated beautifully, asking no questions.

  The same for Nevis and Upshaw. They stood placid and unaware in the boxes while Malone and I shoveled in congealing cement from the trench. The stuff was setting up fast, but it would take a long time to really solidify. No matter. It would be too late for them.

  The hard part, the clumsy part, was loading the two of them into my Buick, which I’d backed into the alley. I almost gave up on my brilliant plan as Malone and I worked to haul them up the ramp—a wheelbarrow helped there—and somehow fit them into the car. I put a tarp over the backseat to protect the upholstery. The boxes made things awkward. They had to be lifted in first, and with the greater part of a man’s body attached to it. Good thing for me that I was not concerned with the physical comfort of my slumbering cargo.

  Malone got in the passenger side, I hit the starter, and we were soon coasting through the silent and near-empty streets toward the Stockyards. I checked the time. A couple of hours yet until sunrise. Comfortable margin. Hard to believe so much had happened in so short a time. No wonder I was tired.

  I didn’t talk; neither did Malone. No way to tell if it was because of his preference or my influence.

  Parking in a place between the streetlights, I told Malone to stay put, trusting that he would trust me. Instead of sieving through the fence, I went over it, going semitransparent in time to avoid the jolt of hitting the ground. Vanishing was easier, but it would stick me with another hypnosis session. I did not want the bother. Malone would just have to guess why I’d stopped there.

  My business with one of the cows did not take long, and I felt reassuringly restored for it. All I needed was a good cleaning up, but not just yet. More to do. Just a little more.

  I drove to an unpleasant and seldom-traveled area of the Yards. You couldn’t see the air, but you could feel it covering you like death’s blanket. Yards away from the center, you could hear the constant buzzing of the flies.

  Poor Malone began gagging. I told him to breathe through his mouth, but that wasn’t much of a help. Within a few minutes he frantically begged me to stop, which I did. He opened the door and vomited freely. He seemed better for it, but I was walleyed for any sign of repetition. I was sorry for him, but none of it could be helped.

  I pulled as close as I dared to a promising spot. It had something I was looking for, a sort of walkway that extended out over a sizable pool.

  Again, Malone and I had a barrel of laughs manhandling the heavy boxes and their human appendages out of the car. There’d been no room for the wheelbarrow, which was a pity. Thankfully, the boxes had handholds cut into them. Those helped a lot. Lifting, I took most of the weight, but needed Malone to balance things and guide us.

  The walkway did not look or feel safe, wobbling alarmingly as we stepped onto it. Had to risk it, though.

  A lot of grunting and barked shins later, Nevis and Upshaw were right at the edge of the walk, and I was ready to wake them up. I sent Malone back to the car. This was my private show. It would only upset him to watch.

  The idea of beating them to death had been the most tempting to me, but after thinking about it, I decided it was too swift and merciful. They were guilty of greed and stupidity, mostly of stupidity, especially Upshaw with his ambition to play with the big boys. Well, if he wanted to learn about the Chicago underworld, then he had just entitled himself to a firsthand experience of one of its more infamous customs.

  As with any enterprise, location is everything. Usually if a man has disgraced himself with the mobs enough to deserve cement overshoes, it is wise to sink him in a very deep part of the river or lake, providing the fish a chance to dispose of the body.

  Again, that would have been too swift and merciful. I had something considerably more hideous in mind.

  The Stockyards is an ugly area, but the backsides of the various processing plants are a hundred times worse. Upton Sinclair had exaggerated nothing in The Jungle, and that was thirty years ago. As it was, he’d badly underdescribed the supreme stench of some places where the filth and waste was flushed out of the plants to gather in shallow pits that eventually trickled into the river.

  The putrefied meat smell combined with blood and urine and feces and any other body matter that was not processed. The waste product
s of thousands upon thousands of slaughtered animals flowed daily into the open air to bake in the sun, to roil and turn upon itself, to simply rot. Day and night it was covered by flies, the big, biting kind. Their maggots writhed freely in the more solid eddies. To call it a cesspool would be a compliment to it and a gross insult to cesspools the world over. This was a pit right out of hell; only hell wouldn’t have anything this bad.

  I had no need to breathe, and I still avoided the place. I’d had absolutely no use for it.

  Until now.

  At a prearranged word from me, Nevis and Upshaw woke at the same time. They’d been artificially asleep on their feet. It did not take long for the awful realization to dawn on them as they sorted their confusion and looked down at their legs. Somehow they’d gone from burying me in cement to being half-buried themselves. The how of it was of no concern to them so much as the what-was-to-come-next part. The pit beneath them was their most important clue.

  Now they swayed and shouted in alarm, anchored by their legs as I’d been anchored to an unresponsive body.

  Their shouts didn’t worry me. No one came here if they could help it.

  Nevis, his eyes wide, stared incredulously at the red, brown, and green sludge and, like Malone, promptly emptied his stomach. In antic imitation, Upshaw did the same. He nearly lost his balance and fell sideways into the muck. I grabbed one of his flailing arms and pulled him upright just in time.

  “Not just yet,” I said. I had to breathe to talk, and for the first time in a very long while was tempted to lose my dinner, too.

  Upshaw was babbling too fast for me to follow, though the gist was predictable. He was willing to do anything to avoid his fate.

  Couldn’t blame him.

  Nevis was just as scared but trying to coax me into talking. He was good at that, but the vile air made it hard for him. He’d turned a shade of green I’d never seen before, and on his gaunt features it was not flattering.

  “P-please, Fleming. You don’t want to do this.” He was trying to sound calm and reasonable. The effect was rather lost as he swatted desperately at the flies swarming around him.