“Oh, you’ll be able to do the next best thing,” she said. And then ducked beneath the water.
“Next best thing?” I asked when she came back up for air a minute later.
She pulled her hair back into a silky black cable that dribbled water between her shoulderblades. “Did you ever wonder why vampires fancy all those caped outfits?”
“Well—”
“Hang-gliding!” she laughed.
I just looked at her.
“Seriously. A vampire’s mass and weight are such that a couple of square yards of fabric, the proper tailoring, and a good breeze occasionally assisted by elevation of a castle parapet or a second story window—well, a lot of folks would swear afterwards that they saw you flying.”
“A few might even swear that you turned into a giant batlike creature,” I mused.
“I think you get the picture.” She submerged again, surfaced by one of the ladders along the side, and began swimming laps back and forth across the width of the pool.
Interesting.
I stood and watched, enjoying the warmth of the water as it swirled around the lower half of my body, enjoying the flash of toned arms and legs cutting the water before me. For a moment I was tempted to join her, to try to match her, lap for lap.
But I was tired. New nightmares seemed to be replacing the old and I hadn’t slept soundly in my new bed. The water seemed to sap my strength further, its warmth making me surprisingly drowsy. I moved to the side of the pool and hoisted myself up and out.
The cooler air quickly revived me and I walked down to the diving board at the deep end of the pool. The board was only a couple of meters above the surface of the water, which was just as well, as I hadn’t gone off any high-boards since those long-gone college years.
As I climbed the short ladder I looked up and saw Bachman in the observation gallery, one story up. She smiled so I waved. It wasn’t much of a wave, but then it hadn’t been much of a smile, either.
Jackknife? Backflip? I walked to the end of the board and decided to make the first dive an ordinary, head-first, try-not-to-miss-the-water affair. After I’d gotten the feel of the board, not to mention my own reflexes, I’d try something fancier.
The board was unresponsive. Or maybe it was my reduced mass that made it seem stiff and unyielding. In any event, I was slightly off balance and I cut the water more like a spatula than a knife. Warmth enveloped me again and I slid down through its enfolding weightiness until I touched bottom.
And there I stayed.
I had always required extra poundage on my weight-belt when I went scuba diving, so I figured my reduced weight and mass would make me even more buoyant now.
I figured wrong.
I reached for the surface, scooping at the water with my hands and kicking off the bottom. I barely moved.
This was not good: I hadn’t taken a particularly deep breath going in and already my lungs were requesting more air. Panic was kick-starting my adrenal glands and riding them around my body like a couple of circus motorcycles in a round steel cage. I started scrabbling at the water like a marionette on rubber strings.
No good.
Fatigue eventually overpowered my hysteria, bringing the tranquility of exhaustion. Finally, I just stood there on the bottom of the pool, in the middle of the deep end, and looked around.
I could make out a frothy line of churning water off in the murk toward the shallow end. I wondered how long it would take Lupé to notice I was gone.
Think, dammit! My lungs were on fire and my vision was starting to fuzz around the edges.
Walk! I could walk up to the shallow end of the pool! But a few bouncing steps brought me to a steep incline that was too slippery to negotiate. I looked around. It was getting harder to see: the light seemed dimmer, now.
There! Maybe ten feet away. . . .
I turned, angling toward the side of the pool and moving farther into the deep end, again. Walking was difficult: I had to reach out and claw at the water as if tunneling through gelatin and bounce off my toes and the balls of my feet. The result was a slow-motion gait that belonged in an old, fifties, men-on-the-moon sci-fi movie.
Slowly, I turned; step by step, inch by inch. . . .
By the time I reached the side I couldn’t see anything at all. I had to feel my way along like a blind man searching for the opening in a wall. Except I wasn’t searching for a window or a door.
My chest bucked and heaved, trying to draw air into my aching lungs: despite all conscious resistance, I knew I would be breathing water in less than a minute. Trying to concentrate past the fear, I stood on tiptoes and bounced.
Nothing.
Move down a foot and try again.
Just flat, smooth concrete.
Maybe it’s out of reach.
Try again.
Can’t even tell if I jumped that time.
Feels like I’m dissolving: legs turning to water.
Hard to keep arms above my head.
Jump.
Something there.
My hand closed on a rung.
I had found the ladder.
As I pulled myself up and out of the water, Elizabeth Bachman leaned down. “Now you know why vampires don’t like to cross running water.” The brown cat with the two tails was crouched beneath a deck chair some ten feet behind her, watching me with wide, golden eyes. I turned my head and observed Lupé still swimming back and forth across the middle of the pool.
“Thanks . . . for sounding . . . the alarm,” I gasped.
She smirked. “I wanted to see if you could make it out on your own.”
“And a good . . . thing, too.” I used the looping railings on the ladder to pull myself upright. “If you had . . . rescued me . . . I would have . . . been forever . . . in your debt.”
It was obvious from the expression on her face that she hadn’t thought of that.
I stayed in the pool for a while longer.
My philosophy tends toward the idea of getting right back up on the horse that throws you. But I stayed in the shallow end because my philosophy doesn’t include confusing nerve with stupidity.
Besides, I wanted to wait until my legs stopped shaking before trying to walk out in front of Garou and Bachman.
While I experimented with my newfound lack of buoyancy, I watched Damien quit the hot tub area and move to a rack of weights near the far side of the shallow end. He removed his sweats, stripping down to a pair of gym shorts, and started in on a series of stretches and warm-up exercises. It was hard not to stare: Schwarzenegger and Stallone had better physiques, but you could only come to that conclusion after thinking about it for awhile. And, in regards to everything else, the vampire was better looking.
“You continue to surprise me,” Lupé said as she steered her wheelchair beside the edge of the pool. “I would’ve expected you to be the type to stare at Deirdre, instead.”
I looked down at my own body. “I think I’m jealous.”
“Yeah, me too.” She put her hands to her bosom. “He’s got more cleavage than I do.”
“That,” I said, “is a near steal from Groucho Marx.”
Her smile turned into a look of confusion. “Gotta go,” she said, putting her hands to the secondary wheel rims.
“Hold on, I’ll take you back.”
“No. I need the exercise.” She flexed her arms. “Good for the shoulders and the pecs.” She flexed her smile and rolled away with an unseemly degree of haste.
Bachman was already gone, so I climbed out and fetched my towel. Drying off, I wandered over to the weight area.
“You like to lift?” the vampire asked affably as I approached.
I shook my head. “Not as a rule. But now that I’m starting a new life, I probably should be starting some new habits.” I looked over various sized weights. “How long does it take to build a body like yours?”
He grinned. “About forty years.”
“What?”
He eased the barbell back down
to the floor. “I wasn’t always into body building. I only started about forty years ago. And then your progress is determined by three things.”
“Which are?” I picked up a pair of hand weights that felt light enough for a beginner’s workout. I began a set of arm curls.
“Genetic predisposition, the frequency and intensity of your workout routines, and whether you’re alive or undead.”
“I follow you on the first two,” I said. “I’m not sure about the last one.”
“Weight training involves increasing muscle mass by breaking it down, first.” He slid a couple more metal plates to the ends of his barbell. “You lift weights, which strain the muscle fibers and break them down so that the body replaces them with greater muscle mass.
“But once you become undead,” he grunted, hefting the bar up to his chin, “your muscle tissues change, become denser, less susceptible to the breakdown process.” The bar rose past his face to its straight-armed zenith above his head. “You can lift greater weights, but your body becomes more resistant to change—even positive change.”
As the bar came back down, I counted the weights and did a little simple arithmetic. Damien was cleaning and pressing four hundred pounds.
“Hello, Mr. Csejthe,” said a new voice. “How do you like our accommodations?” It was Deirdre, still dripping from the hot tub. Gowned and coiffed the night before, she had been a real head-turner. Up close, wet, and nearly naked in turquoise string bikini, she was devastating. I felt my swimming trunks shrink a bit.
“It’s all rather new to me,” I stammered.
“Well, the Doman tries to provide us with the best and the people here are very friendly. Aren’t they, my love?” She ran a slim hand across Damien’s dark jaw as he lowered the weights to the floor.
He grinned and took her hand in his, kissing it.
“I’m going in for about ten minutes of steam and then I’ll be ready to go back up,” she said. “How about you?”
“I should be done by then.”
She smiled and walked away, moving like a twenty-three jewel Swiss watch as she headed toward the steam room.
“I don’t wish to contradict her,” Damien said fondly, “but to Deirdre, everyone seems friendly.”
“I can see why,” I said.
“Not just for her looks, but for her personality, as well. ‘What is beautiful is good and who is good will soon be beautiful.’ ”
Damn! He wasn’t only good looking and charming, he read Sappho, as well!
And then I noticed that I had miscalculated the numbers on the weights we were using. The dumbbells that I had assumed were merely ten pounds were actually ten kilograms. That meant I was curling close to twenty-five pounds in each hand with no effort. And the plates I had assumed to weigh four hundred pounds on Damien’s barbell were more than double that amount.
I devoutly hoped that he wasn’t the jealous type.
Chapter Seven
Three.
I opened my eyes. Looked up at Dr. Mooncloud’s face. Pagelovitch was hovering nearby.
“How do you feel?”
“Calm and refreshed,” I said. She gave me an odd look and I sat up. “So what did we learn?”
“Nothing, really.”
“Dr. Mooncloud regressed you to the last twenty minutes leading up the accident,” Pagelovitch elaborated. “We were looking for causal evidence that might link the accident to your condition.”
“And?” I looked at Mooncloud who was flipping through her notes and then back at the Doman.
“Nothing evident,” he said. “You had a headache. You stopped in Weir for aspirin. Shortly thereafter you fell asleep at the wheel.”
“Or passed out.” This contribution came from Suki, who had returned to her post by the examination room’s door.
“I’ve got something here. . . .” Mooncloud slipped a finger between two pages and flipped back through the note pad. “A few moments ago you were saying that you wanted to reach Frontenac before sundown, but that it was going to be close.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Confirmed by the accident report filed by the county mounties.”
“Significance, Doctor?” the Doman coached.
“Well, during our previous session, Mr. Csejthe made a comment about wanting to stop for lunch. . . . Lupé, hand me the map.”
Garou, her hair still damp from her swim, maneuvered her chair between us to deliver the Kansas state road map.
“See? Here!” Mooncloud’s finger stabbed at the southeast corner. “You would have driven only two more miles, once you passed Scammon, before you had to turn east onto 103. Then, three miles east to hit Weir and another four miles past Weir to hit Highway 69. No more than nine miles to cover from the time you were thinking about stopping for lunch to the time of the accident.”
The Doman studied the map. “So?”
“Well, look here,” she said. “Frontenac is just twelve miles up the highway from the point of the accident.”
“So why would he be worried about beating the sunset?” Pagelovitch concluded.
I considered the numbers. “Somewhere, along that seven mile stretch of 103, I lost several hours. Time I can’t account for.”
“Perhaps your amnesia is more than a post-traumatic effect of the accident,” Mooncloud said. “Perhaps your amnesia was in place before the accident.”
“ ’The Interrupted Journey,’ ” Suki observed.
“You said something about an old man,” the Doman said suddenly.
“I did?”
“No,” Mooncloud said. “You didn’t say it: under hypnosis, you reported that your wife said it.” She skimmed a couple of pages of shorthand notes. “Here it is. She said: ‘I hope that old man is going to be all right.’ Ring any bells?”
Not directly. “No.” But suddenly I recalled the white face in the rear window of the antique Duesenberg the night before last. A face that I had never seen before and yet it persisted in my memory like something disturbingly familiar.
It was the face of an old man.
* * *
The cat dogged me almost everywhere I went.
I asked around, but no one would admit to owning the creature or knowing who did. It had to be a conspiracy: a cat with two tails doesn’t exactly lend itself to anonymity.
“Is it bothering you?” Suki asked on one of the occasions that it wasn’t around.
“No, not really,” I answered. “Although an animal with two tails is a bit unnerving. And I can’t help wondering why it’s attached itself to me.”
“Maybe it likes you. You look like you’d be a cat person.”
“Great,” I muttered as she walked away with a faintly catlike stride of her own. “From bat person to cat person.”
But, all in all, I didn’t really mind that much. Now that I was a freak, myself, it seemed comfortable having another freak around to keep me company. Even if it was only a cat.
If it was only a cat.
If no one was going to tell me, then perhaps I could find out on my own. I popped out of bed the following night, threw on some clothes, poured another saucer of milk for my feline roommate, and headed straight for the Doman’s library.
It was already occupied.
Damien looked up from one of the computer consoles tied to outside on-line services. “Chris, what a coincidence! We were just talking about you.”
Deirdre poked her head out from behind one of the free-standing bookshelves. “Hello, Chris!”
I smiled. “And why am I so interesting?”
“Well, Deirdre has her own reasons,” Damien said, “but, come over here and I’ll show you mine.” I walked over to the console and he motioned me into a seat. “I’ve been assigned to monitor the news in your area as a follow-up to your disappearance. The remains found in the fire are assumed to be yours and the case is pretty much closed. But, look here. . . .” He tapped a series of keystrokes and brought another file up on the monitor.
“Deaths and disapp
earances,” he continued, scrolling the text up the screen. “Mysterious deaths and disappearances, that is.”
“What about them?”
“I’ve been checking every police station and newspaper office within ninety miles of your home. I’ve culled all the funeral notices, accidents, and homicides, eliminating the ones where the witnesses or circumstances identified the assailant or eliminated the supernatural.”
“And?”
He held up a hand. “I backtracked to the time your blood samples left the local hospital and were shipped to three independent labs for analysis. Since the New York team showed up at your doorstep the same night ours did, it’s a good guess that the initial test results flagged their database simultaneously with ours. There’s also the matter of that break-in and homicide at the Joplin hospital. One of your samples was routed there and is now missing.”
“I guess as badly as they wanted me, they were more concerned about destroying evidence of my condition,” I said.
“Maybe. Except the initial tests had already been run and the break-in and theft would only call more attention to it. They covered that, somewhat, by smashing other samples and scattering files, but your records and sample seem to be the only ones that are actually missing. So, these guys are sloppy. But there is a pattern here that goes beyond mere sloppiness.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look. . . .” He brought up another menu on the screen and selected a number. Maps of Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas appeared and conjoined. He executed a series of keystrokes and brought the computer’s mouse into play: the maps were enlarged until the Kansas/Missouri border took up most of the display. “Here’s the hospital break-in where the night nurse was murdered,” he said, using the mouse to plant an electronic flag over Joplin, Missouri. “Here, here, and here, are the disappearances that occurred within forty-eight hours of the incident at your radio station.”
I remembered the fireball bursting through the roof of the old dormitory. Incident. . . .
Damien was planting electronic flags in the Marais des Cygnes Waterfowl refuge in Linn County, another in Garland near the Kansas/Missouri border, and a third in the Prairie State Park north of Mindenmines just over on the Missouri side. “The one in Garland turned up the day after you were picked up.”
One Foot in the Grave - The Halflife Trilogy Book I Page 9