He angled in next to the Firebird and cut the lights.
He started to reach for a pillow from the back, but why bother? It would probably wake Evvie, anyway.
He wadded up his jacket, jammed it against the passenger armrest, and lay down.
First he crossed his arms over his chest. Then behind his head. Then he gripped his hands between his knees. Then he was on his back again, his hands at his sides, his feet cramped against the opposite door.
His eyes were wide open.
He lay there, watching chain lightning flash on the horizon.
Finally he let out a breath that sounded like all the breaths he had ever taken going out at once, and drew himself up.
He got out and walked over to the rest room.
Inside, white tiles and bare lights. His eyes felt raw, peeled. Finished, he washed his hands but not his face; that would only make sleep more difficult.
Outside again and feeling desperately out of synch, he listened to his shoes falling hollowly on the cement.
“Next week we’ve got to get organized . . .”
He said this, he was sure, because he heard his voice coming back to him, though with a peculiar empty resonance. Well, this time tomorrow night he would be home. As unlikely as that seemed now.
He stopped, bent for a drink from the water fountain.
The footsteps did not stop.
Now wait, he thought, I’m pretty far gone, but—
He swallowed, his ears popping.
The footsteps stopped.
Hell, he thought, I’ve been pushing too hard. We. She. No, it was my fault, my plan this time. To drive nights, sleep days. Just so. As long as you can sleep.
Easy, take it easy.
He started walking again, around the corner and back to the lot.
At the corner, he thought he saw something move at the edge of his vision.
He turned quickly to the right, in time for a fleeting glimpse of something – someone – hurrying out of sight into the shadows.
Well, the other side of the building housed the women’s rest room. Maybe it was Evvie.
He glanced toward the car, but it was blocked from view.
He walked on.
Now the parking area resembled an oasis lit by firelight. Or a western camp, the cars rimming the lot on three sides in the manner of wagons gathered against the night.
Strength in numbers, he thought.
Again, each car he passed looked at first like every other. It was the flat light, of course. And of course they were the same cars he had seen a half-hour ago. And the light still gave them a dusty, abandoned look.
He touched a fender.
It was dusty.
But why shouldn’t it be? His own car had probably taken on quite a layer of grime after so long on these roads.
He touched the next car, the next.
Each was so dirty that he could have carved his name without scratching the paint.
He had an image of himself passing this way again – God forbid – a year from now, say, and finding the same cars parked here. The same ones.
What if, he wondered tiredly, what if some of these cars had been abandoned? Overheated, exploded, broken down one fine midday and left here by owners who simply never returned? Who would ever know? Did the Highway Patrol, did anyone bother to check? Would an automobile be preserved here for months, years by the elements, like a snakeskin shed beside the highway?
It was a thought, anyway.
His head was buzzing.
He leaned back and inhaled deeply, as deeply as he could at this altitude.
But he did hear something. A faint tapping. It reminded him of running feet, until he noticed the lamp overhead:
There were hundreds of moths beating against the high fixture, their soft bodies tapping as they struck and circled and returned again and again to the lens; the light made their wings translucent.
He took another deep breath and went on to his car.
He could hear it ticking, cooling down, before he got there. Idly he rested a hand on the hood. Warm, of course. The tires? He touched the left front. It was taut, hot as a loaf from the oven. When he took his hand away, the color of the rubber came off on his palm like burned skin.
He reached for the door handle.
A moth fluttered down onto the fender. He flicked it off, his finger leaving a streak on the enamel.
He looked closer and saw a wavy, mottled pattern covering his unwashed car, and then he remembered. The rain, yesterday afternoon. The rain had left blotches in the dust, marking the finish as if with dirty fingerprints.
He glanced over at the next car.
It, too, had the imprint of dried raindrops – but, close up, he saw that the marks were superimposed in layers, over and over again.
The Firebird had been through a great many rains.
He touched the hood.
Cold.
He removed his hand, and a dead moth clung to his thumb. He tried to brush it off on the hood, but other moth bodies stuck in its place. Then he saw countless shriveled, mummified moths pasted over the hood and top like peeling chips of paint. His fingers were coated with the powder from their wings.
He looked up.
High above, backed by banks of roiling cumulous clouds, the swarm of moths vibrated about the bright, protective light.
So the Firebird had been here a very long time.
He wanted to forget it, to let it go. He wanted to get back in the car. He wanted to lie down, lock it out, everything. He wanted to go to sleep and wake up in Los Angeles.
He couldn’t.
He inched around the Firebird until he was facing the line of cars. He hesitated a beat, then started moving.
A LeSabre.
A Cougar.
A Chevy van.
A Corvair.
A Ford.
A Mustang.
And every one was overlaid with grit.
He paused by the Mustang. Once – how long ago? – it had been a luminous candy-apple red; probably belonged to a teenager. Now the windshield was opaque, the body dulled to a peculiar shade he could not quite place.
Feeling like a voyeur at a drive-in movie theater, McClay crept to the driver’s window.
Dimly he perceived two large outlines in the front seat.
He raised his hand.
Wait.
What if there were two people sitting there on the other side of the window, watching him?
He put it out of his mind. Using three fingers, he cut a swath through the scum on the glass and pressed close.
The shapes were there. Two headrests.
He started to pull away.
And happened to glance into the back seat.
He saw a long, uneven form.
A leg, the back of a thigh. Blonde hair, streaked with shadows. The collar of a coat.
And, delicate and silvery, a spider web, spun between the hair and collar.
He jumped back.
His leg struck the old Ford. He spun around, his arms straight. The blood was pounding in his ears.
He rubbed out a spot on the window of the Ford and scanned the inside.
The figure of a man, slumped on the front seat.
The man’s head lay on a jacket. No, it was not a jacket. It was a large, formless stain. In the filtered light, McClay could see that it had dried to a dark brown.
It came from the man’s mouth.
No, not from the mouth.
The throat had a long, thin slash across it, reaching nearly to the ear.
He stood there stiffly, his back almost arched, his eyes jerking, trying to close, trying not to close. The lot, the even light reflecting thinly from each windshield, the Corvair, the van, the Cougar, the LeSabre, the suggestion of a shape within each one.
The pulse in his ears muffled and finally blotted out the distant gearing of a truck up on the highway, the death-rattle of the moths against the seductive lights.
He reeled.
He seemed to be hearing again the breaking open of doors and the scurrying of padded feet across paved spaces.
He remembered the first time. He remembered the sound of a second door slamming in a place where no new car but his own had arrived.
Or – had it been the door to his car slamming a second time, after Evvie had gotten back in?
If so, how? Why?
And there had been the sight of someone moving, trying to slip away.
And for some reason now he remembered the Indian in the tourist town, slipping out of sight in the doorway of that gift shop. He held his eyelids down until he saw the shop again, the window full of kachinas and tin gods and tapestries woven in a secret language.
At last he remembered it clearly: the Indian had not been entering the store. He had been stealing away.
McClay did not understand what it meant, but he opened his eyes, as if for the first time in centuries, and began to run toward his car.
If I could only catch my goddamn breath, he thought.
He tried to hold on. He tried not to think of her, of what might have happened the first time, of what he may have been carrying in the back seat ever since.
He had to find out.
He fought his way back to the car, against a rising tide of fear he could not stem.
He told himself to think of other things, of things he knew he could control: mileages and motel bills, time zones and weather reports, spare tires and flares and tubeless repair tools, hydraulic jack and Windex and paper towels and tire iron and socket wrench and waffle cushion and traveler’s checks and credit cards and Dopp Kit (toothbrush and paste, deodorant, shaver, safety blade, brushless cream) and sunglasses and Sight Savers and tear-gas pen and fiber-tip pens and portable radio and alkaline batteries and fire extinguisher and desert water bag and tire gauge and motor oil and his moneybelt with identification sealed in plastic—
In the back of his car, under the quilt, nothing moved, not even when he finally lost his control and his mind in a thick, warm scream.
CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO
Investigating Jericho
AUTHOR AND PROFESSIONAL TAROT READER Chelsea Quinn Yarbro published her first story in 1969. A full-time writer since the following year, she has sold more than sixty books and as many short stories.
Her novels include the werewolf volumes The Godforsaken and Beastnights, the quasi-fictional occult series Messages from Michael and More Messages from Michael, and the movie novelizations Dead & Buried and Nomads. Yarbro’s “Sisters of the Night” trilogy (The Angry Angel, The Soul of an Angel and Zhameni: The Angel of Death) is about Dracula’s three undead wives. Unfortunately, it was substantially rewritten by the editor.
However, the author is best-known for her series of historical horror novels featuring the Byronic vampire Saint-Germain, loosely inspired by the real-life eighteenth-century French count of the same name. The first book in the cycle, Hotel Transylvania: A Novel of Forbidden Love appeared in 1978. To date it has been followed by more than a dozen sequels, including The Palace, Blood Games, Path of the Eclipse, Tempting Fate, Out of the House of Life, Darker Jewels, Better in the Dark, Mansions of Darkness, Writ in Blood, Blood Roses, Communion Blood, Come Twilight and A Feast in Exile.
A spin-off sequence featuring Saint-Germain’s lover Atta Olivia Clemens comprises A Flame in Byzantium, Crusader’s Torch and A Candle for D’Artagnan, while Yarbro’s short fiction has been collected in The Saint-Germain Chronicles and The Vampire Stories of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. She received the Grand Master Award at the 2003 World Horror Convention.
As she recalls: “I was on a panel with Stephen King more than twenty years ago in Knoxville, Tennessee, on which panel Steve said that, regarding ‘Salem’s Lot, he believed a small town in a remote part of Maine could vanish and no one would notice. I disagreed, but it took me until the plane ride home to decide who would notice first and do the most about it. And eight years later, those confluences of thought resulted in this story.”
I’ll leave the reader to decide who was right . . .
PAPER ROLLED FROM THE printer in waves, and Morton Symes gathered it up from the floor, scowling at the columns of figures printed there. It was exactly what he had feared. He dragged the material back to his office and began to separate the pages and arrange them.
William Brewster was waiting impatiently when Morton finally came into his office. He wasted no time with polite trivia. “Well?”
“I think it’s a taxpayers’ revolt, sir,” said Morton, holding out his newly assembled file. “According to our records, no one in Jericho has filed income tax returns for the past two years. No one.”
“Jericho,” said Brewster, his eyes growing narrow behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “Where is this place?”
“North of Colebrook, in New Hampshire. Near the Canadian border.”
He held out a photocopy of a Rand McNally map. “I’ve marked it for you in red.”
“Is that a joke?” Brewster asked suspiciously.
“No,” Morton said, horrified. “No, sir. Not at all.”
Brewster nodded, satisfied; then he said, “It might have been a good one, though.”
“Thank you, sir,” Morton said promptly. He stood more or less at attention while Brewster opened the file and scanned through it, pausing from time to time to click his tongue.
“Not a very big place by the look of it,” said Brewster as he put the file down some twenty minutes later.
“Population: 2,579,” Morton said. “As of two years ago.”
“When they stopped paying taxes,” Brewster said with that cold disapproval that made his whim law in the office.
“Well, you see,” Morton pointed out as diplomatically as possible, “last year there were still a few paying taxes, a few. For the last taxable year, not one citizen sent in W-2s or anything else. Not even those entitled to refunds filed. It has to be a tax-payers’ revolt.” He waited while Brewster considered the information.
“I wonder why it took so long to find it?” Brewster mused, his expression suggesting that anyone lax enough to have let this pass might expect a very unpleasant interview.
“Well, it took awhile for the random sampling to catch up with a place that small. With nine states filing in our office, the computer has an enormous number of returns to deal with. And tax reform made it all so complicated . . .” Morton smiled miserably. “I guess we weren’t looking as closely as we should have. There were other things on our minds.” It took the greatest self-control for him not to twiddle the ends of his tie.
“It’s very small; as you say, it wouldn’t turn up quickly in a random comparison.” Brewster was letting him and the rest of the office off the hook, and his expression said he knew it. “So. What are your plans?”
This time, Morton did pull his tie, but just once. “I thought . . . I thought I ought to go look around, investigate the situation, see what’s happening up there.” When he received no response from Brewster, he opened the file and indicated one set of figures. “You see? There’s a small lumber mill that provides employment for over two hundred men and about a dozen women; none of them have filed, and neither has the lumber mill. It might mean that the mill has shut down, in which case there could be a minor recession in the town. I have to check the courts to find out if there’s been a bankruptcy hearing on the mill. And the other large income is from the Jericho Inn, which specializes in sportsmen. There is no indication that it’s still in operation, so I thought . . . well, it might make sense to go there and see for myself . . .”
Brewster glowered as Morton’s words faded. “How long were you planning to be away?”
“I don’t know; a week, maybe two, if the situation warrants the time.” Morton shifted his weight from one leg to the other. Brewster always made him feel about eight years old.
“What would make the situation warrant it?” Brewster asked sharply.
“If the town turns out to be prosperous and is actively refusing to cooperate with
us, then I might not need as much as a week; a few days ought to be enough to get a full report. But if the town is having trouble with unemployment, then I might have to stick around, to see how deep the rot goes.” Morton could not read the cold look in Brewster’s magnified eyes. “We’re supposed to be compassionate, aren’t we, sir? Not make snap judgments or arbitrary rulings? With the reform and all the changes, we were told to be understanding, weren’t we? If the town’s out of money, it could account for what they’ve done.”
“It might,” Brewster allowed. He leaned back and regarded Morton down the length of his long Roman nose, a maneuver calculated to be intimidating. “Why should I send you? Why not Callisher or Brody?”
“Well, I found it, sir,” said Morton, as if he were about to lose a favorite toy.
Brewster nodded once, but returned to the same dominating pose. “That you did. That you did.” He drummed long, thick fingers on the immaculate surface of his desk. “That’s a point.” His next question was so unexpected that Morton was shocked almost to silence. “Where do you come from?”
“I live in Pittsford, just south of –,” Morton began.
“I know where you live,” said Brewster in his best condescending manner. “Where do you come from?”
“Oh.” Morton was afraid he was blushing. “I come from Portland. In Michigan. Between Grand Rapids and Lansing.” He was afraid that if he said anything more, he would stutter.
“Family still there?” Brewster inquired.
“Dad’s in Chicago; Mom’s dead; my older sister lives in Montana, running some kind of tourist ranch – I forget what you call them—”
“Dude ranches,” Brewster supplied.
Morton bobbed his head up and down several times. “Yeah. That’s it. She works there. My younger sister is married to a colonel in the army. They’re stationed in Texas. They were in Europe.” He did his best to look confident. “No family in New England anywhere that I know of.”
Brewster straightened up. “That’s something.” He looked down at the file once more, thumbing his way through the printouts. “I’ll authorize you to travel for a maximum of ten days. I expect a phone report every two days, backed up by a written report when you complete the investigation.” He handed the file back to Morton. “You better come up with something. We don’t want the evening news saying the IRS is persecuting innocent citizens. Best go over that village name by name.”
The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books) Page 38