He shook his head, finally stripped down to honest bafflement. “Who are you?” he asked. “What prize are you playing for, if not for that? And what information could possibly be left in your head that you would go to the length of having an implant put in your brain to prevent me knowing it?”
Eleanor looked away.
“Still won’t talk?” Desmond said. “Well, I’m sorry, Ella, I really am. Because I’m afraid I cannot leave here without learning what I came to know, and it doesn’t matter that you won’t tell me. It doesn’t matter that you’ve got an implant in your brain. Blood never lies, Eleanor, blood never lies. Come here, Eleanor.”
He dragged her over, and she struggled to get away.
“You have no idea how much that arouses me, Eleanor,” Desmond said, and sank his fangs.
The world dissolved again into a red haze, the blood warm and pulsing as it flowed down his throat, and then came the images: blood, the bloody rings drawn on this tabletop, the periodic table, and then, finally, a locked door.
Desmond licked his lips. “What’s behind the door, Eleanor?” he asked. “Hmm? Shall we find out?” and again, he bent his head and drank her blood.
More images. The door swinging open into a red haze that resolved itself into a laboratory, a laboratory in some kind of conservatory or greenhouse, in a house, on a hill.
“Hm. I know that house,” Desmond said, surfacing. “It’s up in the hills, you can see the greenhouse glowing at night. What will I find there, Eleanor?” A third time, he bent to drink.
“Let her go,” said a man’s voice.
“Now who are you, pretty one?” Desmond said to the slender, dark-haired man standing before him, armed with an X-ray wand. Behind him stood Courtland Warner, similarly armed.
“Ah,” said Desmond. “You’re the dark one took the file. And you were there, in the cemetery, the night they took me, weren’t you? I remember you. And you care about this woman, you care deeply. So Ilsa the She-Wolf has a lover!” he said, grinning down at Eleanor, “Curiouser and curiouser!”
“Just let her go,” the dark-haired man said.
“Or you’ll burn me?” Desmond asked. “I daresay you will. Well, little one, you’re in luck. I’m finished with her…for now.” Standing, he dropped Eleanor roughly to the pavement.
“I have your blood now, Eleanor,” he said. “So as you once said to me, there is now nowhere on Earth you can hide.” And Eleanor, on the ground, beaten, half-drowned and bloody, Eleanor, damn her, just met his gaze and said levelly:
“I accept those odds.”
As one, the men raised their weapons, and Desmond had no choice but to vanish. The men rushed to Eleanor.
“Recapture the signal?” she asked. “Oh, yes,” Courtland replied. “Are you all right?”
“I will be,” she replied, “But he got the greenhouse. He knows where it is.”
“Endgame, then,” Courtland said.
“Yes.”
“So we go to the safe-house.” Her lover said.
“Yes, it’s time. Can you get our things, Courtesan?” she said, using her cousin’s real name.
“Sure, Ella.” he replied, and went back inside the motel room. Her lover took her hands and helped her up. Standing, they looked each other in the eyes.
“Let me look,” he said, pulling a pen light from a pocket and shining it into her eyes, checking her pupils.
“I should have known he’d use Deke,” she replied, as he clicked off the light, then laid her wet head on his shoulder, “Just one too many details…”
“I’m so sorry,” her lover replied. “I didn’t hear. I was in the bathroom melting the ice.”
“What if he misses the mugs?” she said.
“We pin-spotted them,” he replied, “He won’t.” He crooked a finger under her chin, lifting her face to drop a kiss on her lips. “You so owe me, Amborella,” he sighed.
She held him close. “I know, Hemlock,” she replied.
12
Eleanor’s
Brian pulled up to the house in the Hollywood hills in his twelve-year-old sedan, the one with the dented quarter-panel and the duct-taped tail-light. His headlights swept the driveway, illuminating Desmond leaning against his Lamborghini in a tailored suit of pale linen.
Brian parked and got out. “Hi, Brian,” Desmond said. “Thanks for coming.”
“How could I refuse?” Brian said, that blush suffusing his cheeks. “So,” he said, “what is this place?”
“It’s your boss’ house,” Desmond replied. “Cynthia checked, it’s in Eleanor’s name. You’ve never been here?”
“No, never.”
“Want to go in?”
“Isn’t that illegal?” Brian asked. Desmond sighed.
“Brian… I’m facing treason charges, conspiracy charges, and oh, yes, one hundred and forty-six thousand counts of first-degree murder. Do you really think a little breaking and entering’s going to stop me?” Desmond asked. He walked over to the front door and easily shouldered it open, pulling the dead-bolt right out of the frame.
They walked through the darkened, empty house, Desmond easily, Brian groping his way after.
“Why do you want me here?” Brian whispered.
“Because there’s a laboratory in this house,” Desmond whispered back. “And I might need an interpreter.”
Moving to the back of the house, they came to the glassed-in conservatory. Desmond touched the light switch and overhead fluorescents blinked on, illuminating benches and tables covered in plants, potting tools, hoses.
“What are we looking for?” Brian asked.
“I don’t really know,” Desmond replied, “But I--”
He broke off, his attention captured by a darkened room off one side of the conservatory, from the doorway of which came a strange, gurgling sound.
They moved toward it, their feet crunching on the gravel floor. At the doorway, Desmond reached around the door jamb, feeling for light switches. He found them, flipped them on.
The room was full with small aquariums on tables, all filled with murky water and some kind of plants, the gurgling of the aerating pumps providing a creepy background noise. Moving closer, Desmond and Brian got a better look at one of the plants.
The plant rode on the surface of the water, its center formed by overlapping leaves, its roots hidden in the dark water. Reaching in with a fingertip, Desmond touched it, and they gasped as it unfolded, revealing on its glistening inner leaves a tiny skeleton.
“What the hell?” Desmond said. He moved to another aquarium, touched another plant, which also unfolded, revealing a similar, but not identical, tiny skeleton. He touched another, and another: all skeletons.
“Okay,” he said. “This is weird. Even by my standards.”
“What are they?” Brian asked.
Bending lower, Desmond could make out the labels. “They have labels,” he said. “This one is Microtitus oregoni. Whatever that is.”
Brian looked around, and on a nearby shelf he spotted a well-thumbed copy of the Encyclopedia Animalia. He pulled it down and turned to the index. He found the page.
“Mictotus oregoni… here. A creeping meadow vole.”
“And this one,” Desmond said, “Sorex minutissinus.”
Brian flipped pages. “A least shrew,” he said.
“Mus musculus?”
“House mouse.” Brian set down the book, gazed at the plants. “They’re like giant Venus flytraps…” he said.
“These are all the skeletons of small mammals,” Desmond said. “Flytraps don’t catch mammals, do they?”
“Look, below the labels: dates, weights,” Brian said, pointing. “These are experiments.”
“So?”
“So the purpose of experimentation is to find out what you don’t know,” Brian said. “All the carnivorous plants I ever heard of trap insects… maybe the point of these experiments is to find out how these plants react to mammals.”
“But why?” Desmond asked, staring at the plants. Then a thought occurred, and a look of grim curiosity crossed his face… he suddenly plunged both hands into the aquarium’s peaty water.
“Desmond, don’t!” Brian gasped. But Desmond was ripping the plant from its place, his hands bringing up from the water a swollen sac, dark red amid slithery roots. He was trying to be careful, but suddenly the sac burst, spewing bright red blood all over his linen suit.
“My God!” Brian said.
“That’s what they do with the mammals,” Desmond said. “They take their blood. Vampire plants!” He turned to Brian. “How do you get from porphyrin rings in a textbook to, ‘of course, vampires.’” he said, speaking aloud the question that had come to him in his cell as he’d painted the interlocking rings in his own blood, and Brian recognized the question he’d tried to ask Eleanor that day in the hall, just before she’d given him the book on radiation. “Knowing about these plants would really help with that cognitive leap, wouldn’t they? Eleanor Warner is a scientist, Brian, but these plants are her true work, and she knew about them before she ever came to me.”
“But… why?” Brian said.
“I have no ide--” Desmond started to say, but then broke off, because he’d turned toward the door, the door through which they had entered, and there, off to one side of it sat a small table, a small table in a pool of light, on top of which sat two glass mugs. One of the mugs, Desmond saw as he drew closer to them, contained a milky, watery fluid, the tag of a tea bag still hanging over its lip; the other contained a red fluid, the same red fluid now spattering the front of his suit. The mug with the tea bag was etched with the word HERS, and the other, Desmond saw as it picked it up and turned it in his hand, was etched HIS.
Desmond looked from the mug to Brian, his eyes growing wide. “The dark one,” he said. “The dark one who knows how people bleed.” And there came into his mind a memory, a memory he’d forgotten he even had, buried as it was in the exigencies of the moment and all that had happened since. In his mind’s eye he saw again what he’d seen in the cemetery the night they caught him, that last flash of the two men bending over his victim, the bloody hand of the dark-haired medic rising from the wounded throat to the medic’s mouth, watched, as Eleanor’s lover licked the blood from his hand.
“You bitch.” Desmond said, almost wonderingly.
“What?” Brian said, but Desmond was looking at his watch. “There’s still time,” he said. “Come on!”
He spun and darted out of the room, retracing his steps, Brian stumbling after.
“Desmond, wait!” Brian cried, barking his shin on some piece of furniture. “Where are we going?”
“My treason hearing!” Desmond called back. “It’s starting in fifty minutes and I need to know, and there’s just one way to find out!”
“But they’ll capture you… find out what? wait, what...what’s going on?!” Brian pulled up short as Desmond spun around to face him at the front door of the house, his hands on either side of the frame.
“She outs me,” he said, eyes blazing. “She reveals me to the world as a vampire? Oh, I think two can play that game!” He spun again, running out into the driveway, and Brian followed, almost running into Desmond’s back, as Desmond had stopped short, was standing with his arms crossed, staring disdainfully at Brian’s car.
Desmond looked at Brian.
“Ever ride in a Lamborghini?” he asked.
13
Federal Court
The courtroom of the United States District Court on Spring Street was packed, with local and international press jostling for room with officers of the United States Air Force and their lawyers, representatives from the NSA, The NRC and Homeland Security, Executives from IT&T and their lawyers, CG&P executives and their lawyers, Magna Studios executives and their lawyers, while guards armed with both automatic rifles and X-ray wands patrolled the perimeter. Deke Hollingsworth --now sober-- sat stoically in the front row, a pale Chuck Mahoney next to him, Courtland Warner and an empty chair reserved for Eleanor on Chuck’s other side. Eleanor’s lover, still unknown to most, sat in the row behind Courtland, and across the aisle, Judge Laverna Davis sat next to her husband. On the other side of the bar, the U.S. District Attorney and his staff had one table; Desmond’s defense team, hand-picked by Cynthia, the other.
The door at the back opened, and Eleanor entered. Cynthia, who was standing in front of her table gathering papers, looked up, saw her, and gasped.
She had transformed. Her hair was down and softly styled, the mousy grey washed out in an auburn rinse. The clunky glasses were gone, her makeup applied with a deft touch. She wore heels and a wrap dress in a silky black knit, and without the lab coat Cynthia could see she actually had a figure. As she turned to enter the seating row, Cynthia’s feminine eye noticed the fishnet stockings encasing her legs. Then the Federal Judge called the hearing to order, and Cynthia gathered herself and said her preliminary remarks, ending with the words all defense attorneys said at the beginning of every trial, on the off chance it just might happen:
“I move this trial be dismissed--”
“That won’t be necessary, Cynthia,” said Desmond Sharpe, striding down the aisle into the courtroom to audible gasps, guns and wands leveling at him from all directions. Behind him, Brian appeared, slightly green, hanging onto the door frame for support.
“Desmond!” Cynthia cried. “What are you doing here?!” Her eyes dropped. “My God!” she exclaimed. “Whose blood is that?”
“Mus musculus,” Desmond replied.
“What?” Cynthia said.
“So, where is the little bitch?” Desmond wondered aloud.
“She’s right here,” Eleanor replied, standing.
“Oh, not you, honey,” Desmond said and in an almost invisible flow of movement he was over the railing, knocking her aside, bowling observers out of the way, and fastening on her lover, propelling them both to the floor, his fangs driving deep into the veins of the man’s throat.
The world disappeared. Blood, just blood, hot, mawkish, metallic: then a swirling blackness, and a sensation, undeniable, overwhelming, of vastness, of nothingness all around, of utter, annihilating, unbearable space. Then a light bloomed, dusky, febrile, as deeply red as venous blood, a light that resolved itself into a star, a smoldering sun shining upon a dark world of jagged black mountains, untracked forests, and bogs, endless bogs, bogs stretching away into the perpetual night, bogs filled with bloody plants, plants harvested by hundreds, nay, thousands, of black-haired, pale-skinned people, people who drank blood on an alien world.
Desmond withdrew his fangs, stared in horror at the man beneath him. Impossible, but blood never lied. Blood never lied.
“I’m still telling,” Desmond said.
“I can’t stop you,” said Hemlock, playing out the last of the rope.
Desmond stood, faced the courtroom, the cameras, the eyes of the world.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” he announced. “You know what I am. But you do not know what these people are. They are not what they seem. They are, in fact--”
Quick as a cat, Eleanor pulled the red wig she’d worn onstage at the Galaxy Cinema out of her bag and tossed it at Desmond’s feet.
He stared at it, the up at her, at Courtesan, at Hemlock, and a series of images began to flash before his eyes:
The wig on the floor.
The wig on the girl at the theater.
The girl at the theatre, stripping to her corset and fishnets.
The fishnets on Eleanor’s legs.
The plant bursting blood through his hands.
The blood on Hemlock’s hands.
Eleanor, mouthing the words “I accept those odds.”
The alien world of Hemlock’s mind, and the white faces staring at him, expectant.
The faces of the audience at the movie theater, turning en masse from the screen to the back row, as if turning to him, also expectant.
And finally, the marquee of the cinema itself, blinking GALAXY, GALAXY, GALAXY.
Desmond stared, aghast, at Eleanor, and finally, finally got it, realizing simultaneously that it had been a game all along, a great game, and that he had lost, because he couldn’t say it, just couldn’t, because if he did, vampire or no vampire, they’d lock him up for a looney.
“That squirming sensation in your forehead?” Amborella said. ‘That would be the mindfuck.” And then she added, simply, “Check…mate.”
“What?” said Cynthia.
“We’re aliens,” said Courtesan behind her.
“What?” said Cynthia
“You didn’t see the montage,” said Hemlock.
“What?!” said Cynthia.
“Oh, fuck it,” Amborella said, and she threw back her head and threw out her arms and the music crashed in, music without apparent source or support, music that swept up every living soul in the room, because music can, and it caught Desmond, who was laughing now, in on the joke, and he was singing back, though he didn’t know why or how. “How am I doing this?” he yelled at at the end of a bar.
“Just relax, go with it,” Amborella yelled back, and then was on to the next verse, running to and being swung around by Hemlock, who grabbed the tie to her wrap dress and spun her back into the fray without it, resplendent one more in corset and fishnets. She came back to Desmond for the chorus, and the music was so bouncy and happy and infectious it got them all, lawyerly toes tapping, soldierly bodies swaying, the judge shaking his gavel like a maraca, the court reporter diligently recording the lyrics.
The Midnight Vampire Trap Page 7