Van Diemen touched ground at the side of the house. All the guards were gone and the gate stood open. Outside the gate and away from it, everything was a wild uproar. The siren went on whooping. Chasing the big cats or trying to keep themselves from being killed would keep the guards busy for a long time. Somebody would be contacting the police by now; so the police would be there in minutes.
Van Diemen looked in a guest-house window from the front porch and saw Maggie Connors sitting on a couch with a drink and a camera in front of her on a coffee table. The uproar hadn’t moved her from where she sat; the booze might have deadened her reflexes. Across from her, sitting in a cane chair, was a guard holding a tranquilizer gun. He raised the gun when Van Diemen came in and locked the door behind him.
“Don’t move,” the guard said. He fired the gun as Van Diemen moved toward him. The tranquilizer dart buried itself in Van Diemen’s chest. He pulled the dart loose, and threw it away, and kept coming. The frightened guard upended the gun and tried to hit the vampire with the stock. Van Diemen tore the gun from the other man’s hands and knocked him unconscious. On the couch, Maggie Connors hadn’t moved.
Maggie Connors was reaching toward the coffee table when he turned to her and said, “Don’t touch that camera or I’ll kill you. You took pictures of me. Where’s the film?”
She seemed to be more bewildered than afraid. “Still in the camera,” she said, nodding toward the table. “I haven’t made any more photographs.” She’d been drinking, but she wasn’t drunk.
Van Diemen picked up the camera and threw it into the fireplace, where a fire was burning. The camera made a popping sound and began to burn. As soon as it did, Van Diemen realized that he hadn’t looked at the film. She could have been lying. He had to keep her alive long enough to answer some questions.
“What’re you going to do, Anton, if that’s your name?
“Never mind what my name is. You set a trap for me—why? Did you think you could catch a vampire with a net and a dart gun?”
“Then you really are a vampire?”
“I told you I was a vampire. What did you think I was?”
“I don’t know what I thought. I’d been drinking and suddenly there you were. I didn’t know what you were. I thought maybe you were crazy and just believed you were a vampire. You came at me and the camera was all I had to fight you off.”
Van Diemen looked at her. She was in her late thirties; she seemed older looking since he could see her in the light. She was still well built, a little hard faced from the alcohol and the life she led. Still, she was handsome, and she thought she was tough. He’d show her how wrong she was.
“When I disappeared, what did you think?” he asked. By now the camera was just a burning lump of metal and plastic. “Did you see what I became?”
“No, I didn’t. I wasn’t wearing my glasses. One moment you were there; the next you were gone. I didn’t know what to think. I’m not lying about the glasses. They’re right there on top of the TV set. My initials are on the case.”
Van Diemen trusted nothing she said; he looked at the glasses and the case. The glasses were bifocals with expensive frames, and the case was real leather with the letters MC stamped into it.
“But you saw me well enough without these,” he said.
“I can see better with them,” she said. “Much better.”
Outside, most of the noise had moved away from the security area. A few men were still shouting; the police cars hadn’t arrived yet.
“I turned into a giant bat and flew away”. Van Diemen wanted to see how Maggie Connors reacted. The woman had caused him so much worry that he wanted her to suffer a lot.
“You’re saying you turned into a giant bat?” Her voice was flat; it showed nothing but mild surprise.
Van Diemen was very much annoyed by her complaisance, and for an instant, he was tempted to show her what a giant bat looked like. He was glad he didn’t when boots sounded on the porch, and somebody knocked on the door.
“Ms. Connors,” a man said, “this is Spinelli. You all right in there? Some big cats got loose and we’re trying to catch them.”
The door was locked, and Van Diemen showed Maggie Connors the key. “Tell him you’re all right,” he whispered. “Do it.”
Maggie Connors went to the door. “I’m all right, Mr. Spinelli. Mike is still with me.”
“Tell him not to budge,” Spinelli said. “This may take us a while, but you’re in no danger. Keep the door locked and you’ll be okay. I got to go now. Wait for the police.”
Spinelli went away and Van Diemen motioned Maggie Connors back to the couch. She picked up her drink as she sat down. Her hand wasn’t as steady as her manner; the ice cubes rattled in the glass.
Van Diemen knew he had a little time. The zoo was a huge place and the big cats had a hundred places to hide. Spinelli and his men might need all night to catch them. Police cars with their sirens going full blast were coming in from the boulevard. The sirens wound down and stopped, and it was quiet after that.
“Why did you try to trap me?” Van Diemen asked. “Did you think you’d make a big story out of it?”
“A big story—something like that,” she said. “I thought, here’s this strange guy, well dressed, not a loony, not a wino, suddenly appears in the middle of the zoo and tells me he’s a vampire. It’s night, it’s dark, and the zoo is closed. So what is he doing there? ‘I’m a vampire,’ he says. Then he says it louder: I’m a vampire.’ I hold him off with the flash, and then, just like that, he disappears.”
“What did you do after I left?” Van Diemen asked.
Maggie Connors held on to her glass. “I came back here and had a drink. I was shook, but not that shook. I’ve seen strange things in all parts of the world. Went after Bigfoot with some Canadian scientists. You were strange, but not that strange, not to me. My first thought was you were crazy. You believed you were a vampire. Then I thought maybe you were a phony vampire from Greenwich Village. I couldn’t decide what you were. I locked the door and called security.”
“Did you tell them that you’d been menaced by a vampire, that you’d talked to a vampire who had suddenly disappeared?”
Maggie Connors drank the rest of her drink, then said, “Of course not. They’d think I was crazy. I told them some man had threatened me and I scared him off with the flash. I gave them your description. I said you ran off into the dark. That’s what I thought you’d done.”
“Make yourself another drink if you want to.” Van Diemen thought he’d been meeting a lot of alcoholics lately. Wilcox and Vincent and Tracy Lee Dembroder. Liquor didn’t seem to affect the Connors woman as much as it did the others.
With a fresh drink in her hand, Maggie Connors said, “Security found nothing, but I stayed up all night. I thought you might hide somewhere and then come back.”
“Would you have been more afraid of a vampire than a human?”
The guard on the floor was groaning; but Van Diemen kicked him in the head and he stopped.
Maggie Connors said, “How can I answer that? I was afraid. If I could’ve been sure what you were, I wouldn’t have been so scared. All I knew was a crazy was out there. I’m scared of crazies. I’d rather face a rhino than a crazy. You never know what a crazy is going to do.”
Van Diemen took a step closer to her. “I am a vampire. I am not crazy. He brought his voice down. “I am a rational being. You, on the other hand, are a coarse, vulgar woman, your brain softened by”—he looked at the label on the bottle from which she’d poured her drink— “gin. If anyone is crazy, you are.”
Since Maggie Connors just looked at him, he asked, “How did you get this trap set up? Did you tell the director? Someone must have authorized it.”
“I told the director what I saw, what you looked like, what you said. He knows I don’t lie, even when I drink. We grew up together. He’s a man with an open mind. He doesn’t believe or disbelieve until the evidence is in.”
“Where is he now
?”
“In the hospital with a multiple fracture of his left leg. He got it climbing over the rocks in the bear enclosure. But the plan to trap you was already in place, and he said it could go on without him. Mr. Spinelli is a very capable man.”
“Is he now?” Van Diemen said. “He hasn’t done so well tonight. I’m still free as a bat, as you see.”
Maggie Connors dared to be brave. “I hear what you’re saying. But even if you are a vampire, what right have you to do what you’re doing? You broke in and threatened me that night. Now tonight you break in again and let the big cats loose. What if they get out onto the streets and kill people? Don’t you think society has a right to trap you and put you where you can’t do any more harm?”
The good-looking bitch had courage, he had to admit. Not many humans would risk talking to a vampire so brusquely. Many tough-talking women found their role models in the movies, and sometimes they got the silver screen confused with leaden reality. But Maggie Connors really had seen the rough side of life.
“I am a vampire,” Van Diemen said proudly, “and therefore I am free from what you might call moral restraint. What humans believe or don’t believe has nothing to do with me. As a responsible vampire, I kill once a day in order that I may live. Yes, I could refrain from killing and die slowly as a result, thereby sparing the lives of the inconsequential humans I might feed on in the future. Their lives weighed against mine, so to speak. Should I do the noble thing and die? Nonsense! It would be a futile gesture, and the lives I spared by making it would plod onward in their dismal, meaningless way. What do such creatures know of beauty, of the life of the mind? Very little at best. Besides, they would die anyway, some after the misery of prolonged illness, others by chance.”
Van Diemen realized he was thirsty; he dashed some lime juice into a glass, and mixed it with ice water from the bucket, and drank the liquid down. He was tired of talking to someone who greeted what he was saying with a blank face. He’d said enough. It was time to move on to other things. He thought he would seduce the woman before he killed her. That hadn’t been his intention, not with all the guards around. But now there seemed to be no reason why he shouldn’t do it. Since the guards were busy, there was no impediment.
“Intellectually,” Maggie Connors said, her voice thickening a little. “Intellectually, I hear what you’re saying, but—”
“Be quiet,” he said.
“What’re you going to do?”
“I’m going to have my way with you.”
“Don’t get too rough about it. I can be pretty rough myself. I know how to protect myself. I know how to dish it out.”
“Why didn’t you dish it out the other night?” he asked.
“It was dark,” she said. “I couldn’t see you clear enough without my glasses. I can see you now. I can see you have a great big hard-on. I don’t mind being fucked by a vampire. Lord knows I’ve been fucked by everyone but the Birdman of Alcatraz. Just don’t get too rough.” Maggie Connors was wearing baggy khaki shorts. She undid a button and they fell to the floor. She wore no panties. She stepped out of the shorts, pulled her khaki shirt over her head, and threw it aside. Van Diemen took off his clothes as fast as he could. His erection pressed against her body as she drew him close to her. One of her hands grasped his penis, the other examined the place on his chest where the tranquilizing dart had struck.
“Not even a mark,” she whispered. “I saw that dart bury itself in your flesh. I saw you pull it out, and now there isn’t even a mark. You are not human.”
“I am a vampire.”
She wound her arms around his neck and kissed him before he drew her down onto the floor, which was covered with rough mats. If the cordage hurt her back, she gave no sign of it. For all Van Diemen’s vaunted memory, he could not remember when last he had been kissed by a woman. He had kissed the woman who had tried to kill him. How many others?
None that he could think of. He had raped and killed many women, but he hadn’t kissed any. He didn’t even kiss his mistresses.
Maggie Connors groaned with pleasure as he thrust himself into her. Her voice was dreamy. “I’m being screwed by a vampire,” she murmured. Van Diemen pumped faster and she squirmed under him. She clawed at him, murmuring all the while. She let out a wild cry and climaxed as Van Diemen did. Outside, a vehicle drove into the security area just across from the house. There might have been more than one vehicle; Van Diemen couldn’t be sure. Men were shouting, but so far nobody came to the door.
Still gasping and wild-eyed, Maggie Connors looked up at Van Diemen. He was about to sink his sharp teeth into her throat when she struck him under the nose with the heel of her hand. The blow, delivered commando style, stunned him for a moment, and by the time he recovered she had thrown him off her. He sprang at her, and she knocked him down with a knee kick. By the time he struggled to his feet, she had armed herself with a heavy iron poker, the end red-hot from sticking in the fire.
She held him off with the poker, and she could have shouted for help. But instead of screaming she talked to him in a quiet voice. “I won’t let you kill me. There’s no need to kill me.
You think there is, but there isn’t. We don’t have to be doing this. The guards will hear me if I scream. I don’t want to scream. The guards have stun guns. Will you promise to stop this if I put down the poker?”
Van Diemen didn’t know what to think; nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He didn’t know what stun guns could do to him. He knew they sent out a powerful electrical charge that would jolt a large animal or a human into unconsciousness. He didn’t want to find out what they could do to a vampire. Nor did he want a bunch of men piling in on top of him.
“Stop it,” Maggie Connors said. “Let’s get dressed and talk.”
Vah Diemen sat beside her on the couch while she made a drink for herself. He didn’t want one, but when she fixed him a drink of lime juice and ice water, he drank. Maggie Connors’s face was flushed.
“That was the best sex I ever had in my live,” she told him. She tried to take his hand and put it inside her shorts, but he pulled it away.
“Stop that,” he said. He knew he had to decide on a course of action. He thought he could kill Maggie Connors and get away in spite of the guards outside the security building.
“Take me with you when you leave,” Maggie Connors said. “I’m not afraid of you now. I believe you’re a vampire, but part of you is human. How could you hick me if part of you wasn’t human?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Van Diemen was listening to the shouting of the guards. He couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“Of course I do.” Maggie Connors sounded positive. “You’re like no man I’ve ever been with. It’s not just the sex. It’s the way I felt when you were in me. Please take me with you. Let me live with you. I don’t have to become a vampire to live with you, do I?”
Van Diemen looked directly at her. “No mortal woman has ever lived with a vampire. To ask to do such a thing shows how little you know. What you propose is unnatural, and you must not repeat it.”
Maggie Connors made herself another drink. “I want to do it,” she said after a long swallow. “I want to live with you. I admit I am a jaded, burned-out person. I’ve tried everything: drugs, booze, every kind of man, lesbianism, bestiality, sadism—”
“And now you want to try vampires?”
“No, not vampires, just you. You say you have to kill to live. That doesn’t really shock or frighten me. Death loses its meaning when you’ve seen so much of it as I have. I don’t care what you do. I want to be with you. God help me, I think I’ve fallen in love with you.”
“You’re drunk.” Van Diemen knew he’d have to leave soon; the was intolerable. She was crazy.
“I know I’m drunk, but I also know what I’m saying.” Maggie Connors tried to get close to him, but he moved away. “Nothing will ever excite me again after you. Have you never thought of living with a
woman of your own? Do you have a wife? I hope you don’t. I want to be your woman. I’d love you and take care of you. I’d protect you from the world.”
Van Diemen was at a loss for words, which rarely happened. The Connors woman was a lusty sex partner, but to have her as a wife was unthinkable. Never in his very long life had he entertained such an idea. He had five mortal mistresses to call on anytime he felt the need for sex. Apart from that, the world was full of beautiful women, and he could have them anytime he cared to make the effort. The Connors woman missed being beautiful, but that wasn’t why he didn’t want her. The truth was he didn’t want anyone. The thought of having his evenings, his reading, his writing, and his solitude ruined by the prattling of some woman made his skin crawl.
There was a television set with a fifty-inch screen in his library. If Maggie Connors came to live at the castle, what kind of programs would she want to watch? And what if she wanted sex at times when he did not? Sex for him came in a wild burst of energy, and it was usually sadistic. That night, he had been able to control himself; he hadn’t bitten her breasts as he’d coupled with her.
“It simply wouldn’t work,” he said at last. “I am a vampire, and you are a mortal.”
“Do you still want to kill me?”
“I think I should kill you.”
“Will you try?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why would you want to kill a great artist? All these nothings you say you’ve killed— okay—but why kill me?”
Van Diemen stared at her. “You consider yourself a great artist?”
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