by Tanya Huff
This is ridiculous. Pull yourself together, Nelson. There’s nothing down in that tunnel that could hurt you. Her right foot slid forward half a step. The worst thing you’re likely to run into is a TTC official and a trespassing charge. Her left foot moved up and passed the right. Good God, you’re acting like some stupid teenager in a horror movie. Then she stood on the first step. The second. The third. Then she was on the narrow concrete strip that provided a safe passage along the outside rail.
See. Nothing to it. She wiped suddenly sweaty palms on her coat and dug in her purse for her flashlight, then, with the satisfyingly solid weight of it in her hand, flooded the tunnel with light. She would have preferred not to use it, away from the harsh fluorescents of the station, the tunnel existed more in a surreal twilight than a true darkness, but her night-sight had deteriorated to the point where even twilight had become impenetrable. The anger her condition always caused wiped away the last of the fear.
She rather hoped something was skulking in her path. For starters, she’d feed it the flashlight.
Pushing her glasses up her nose, her gaze locked on the beam of light, Vicki moved carefully along the access path. If the trains were on schedule—and while the TTC wasn’t up to Mussolini, it did all right—the next one wouldn’t be along for another, she checked the glowing dial of her watch, eight minutes. Plenty of time.
She reached the first workman’s alcove with six minutes remaining and sniffed disapprovingly at the evidence of police investigation. “Sure, boys,” she muttered, playing the light around the concrete walls, “mess it up for the next person.”
The hole Celluci’s team had dug was about waist level in the center of the back wall and about eight inches in diameter. Stepping over chips of concrete, Vicki leaned forward for a better look. There was, as Celluci said, nothing but dirt behind the excavation.
“So if he didn’t come in here,” she frowned, “where did he. . . .” Then she noticed the crack that ran the length of the wall, into and out of the exploratory hole. A closer look brought her nose practically in contact with the concrete. The faint hint of a familiar smell had her digging for her Swiss army knife and carefully scraping the edges of the dark recess.
The flakes on the edge of the stainless steel blade showed red-brown in the flashlight beam. They could have been rust. Vicki touched one to the tip of her tongue. They could have been rust, but they weren’t. She had a pretty good idea whose blood she’d found but brushed the remaining flakes into a plastic sandwich bag anyway. Then she squatted and ran the blade up under the crack at the top edge of the hole.
Even as she did it, she wasn’t sure why. Most of Ian’s blood had been sprayed over the subway station wall. There could not have been enough blood on the killer’s clothes to have soaked all the way through a crack in six inches of concrete even if he’d been wearing paper towels and had remained plastered against the wall for the entire night.
When she pulled out the knife, mixed in with dirt and bits of cement, were similar red-brown flakes. These went into another bag and then she quickly repeated the procedure at the bottom edge of the hole with the same results.
The ioar of the subway became a welcome, normal kind of terror for the only explanation Vicki could come up with as the alcove shook and a hundred tons of steel hurtled past, was that whatever killed Ian Reddick had somehow passed through the crack in the concrete wall.
And that was patently ridiculous.
Wasn t it?
As the largest producer and wholesaler of polyester clothing, Sigman’s Incorporated didn’t exactly run a high security building. Since the murder of Terri Neal in the underground parking lot, they’d tried to tighten things up.
In spite of four and a half pages of new admittance regulations, the guard in the lobby glanced up as Vicki strode past, then went back to his book. In gray corduroy pants, black desert boots, and her navy pea jacket she could have been any one of the hundreds of women who came through the area every day and he was neither expected nor encouraged to stop all of them. She certainly wasn’t the press—the guard had grown adept at spotting the ladies and gentlemen of the fifth estate and herding them off to the proper authorities. She didn’t look like a cop, and besides, cops always checked in. She looked like she knew where she was going, so the guard decided not to interfere. In his opinion, the world could use a few more people who knew where they were going.
At 2:30 in the afternoon, the underground parking garage was empty of people which explained pretty much exactly why Vicki was there at that time. She stepped off the elevator and frowned up at the whining fluorescent lights. Why the hell don’t they have security cameras down here? she wondered as the echoes of her footsteps bounced off the stained concrete walls.
Even without the scuffed and faded chalk marks she could tell where the body had fallen. The surrounding cars had been crammed together, leaving an open area over three spaces wide, as if violent death were somehow contagious.
She found what she’d come looking for tucked almost under an ancient rust and blue sedan. Her lower lip caught between her teeth, she pulled out her knife and knelt beside the crack. The blade slid in its full six inches, but the bottom of the crack was deeper still. The red-brown flakes that came up on the steel had most certainly not dropped off the wreck.
She sat back on her heels and frowned. “I really, really don’t like the looks of this.”
Fishing a marble from the bottom of her bag, she placed it on one of the remaining chalk marks and gave it a little push. It rolled toward the wall, moving away from the crack at almost a forty-five degree angle. Further experiments produced similar results. Blood, or for that matter anything else, could not have traveled from the body to the crack in any way that might be called natural.
“Not that there’s anything even remotely natural about any of this,” she muttered, tucking this third sandwich bag of dried blood in beside the others and crawling after her marble.
Rather than go back through the building. she climbed up the steeply graded driveway and out onto St. Clair Avenue West.
“Excuse me?”
The attendant in the booth looked up from his magazine.
Vicki waved a hand back down the drive in the general direction of the underground garage. “Do you know what’s under the bottom layer of concrete?”
He looked in the direction she indicated, looked back at her, and repeated, “Under the concrete?”
“Yeah ”
“Dirt, lady.”
She smiled and eased around the barricade. “Thanks. You’ve been a great help. I’ll show myself out.”
The chain link fence protested slightly and sagged forward under Vicki’s weight as she peered down into the construction site. It was, at the moment, little more than a huge hole in the ground filled with smaller holes, filled with muddy water. All the machinery appeared to have been removed and work stopped. Whether because of the murder or the weather, Vicki had no way of knowing.
“Well,” she shoved her hands down into the pockets of her coat, “there’s definitely dirt.” If there was any blood, it was beyond finding.
“No problem, Vicki.” Rajeet Mohadevan tucked the three sandwich bags into the pocket of her lab coat. “I can run them through before I head home tonight with no one the wiser. Are you going to be around the building?”
“No.” Vicki saw the flicker of sympathy across the researcher’s face but decided to ignore it. Rajeet was doing her a favor, after all. “If I’m not at home, you can leave a message on the machine.”
“Same number?”
“Same number.”
Rajeet grinned. “Same message?”
Vicki found herself grinning back. The last time the police lab had called her at home had been in the worst of the fights between her and Celluci. “Different message.”
“Pity.” Rajeet gave an exaggerated sigh of disappointment as Vicki headed for the door. “I’ve forgotten a few of the places you told him to stuff his occurren
ce book.” She sketched a salute—a reminder of the old days, when Vicki had been an intense young woman in a uniform—and returned to the report she’d been filling out before the interruption.
Walking down the hall, the familiar white tiles of the corridor wrapping around her like an old friend, Vicki considered heading through the tunnel to headquarters and checking to see if Celluci were at his desk. She could tell him about the cracks, find out if he’d been withholding any more information from her, and . . . no. Given his mood the last time they’d talked and given that he hadn’t called over the weekend, if she showed up now she’d just interfere with his work and that was something neither of them ever did. The work being what it was, the work came first and the cracks were added questions, not answers.
She was out of the building entirely when she realized that the thought of seeing another cop sitting at what had been her desk had not influenced her decision one way or another. Feeling vaguely like she’d betrayed her past, she hunched her shoulders against the late afternoon chill and started for home.
For years Vicki had been promising to buy herself a really good encyclopedia set. For years she’d been putting it off. The set she had, she’d bought at the grocery store for five dollars and ninety-nine cents a volume with every ten dollars worth of groceries. It didn’t have a lot to say about vampires.
“Legendary creatures, uh huh, central Europe, Vlad the Impaler, Bram Stoker. . . .” Vicki pushed her glasses up her nose and tried to remember the characteristics of Stoker’s Dracula. She’d seen the play years ago and thought she might have read the book in high schoolonly a lifetime or two back.
“He was stronger, faster, his senses were more acute. . . .” She flicked the points off on her fingertips. “He slept all day, came out at night, and he hung around with a guy who ate flies. And spiders.” Making a disgusted face she turned back to the encyclopedia.
The vampire,” she read, “was said to be able to turn into bats, wolves, mist, or vapor.” The ability to turn to mist or vapor would explain the cracks, she realized. The victim’s blood, being heavier, would precipitate out to coat the narrow passageway. “And a creature that rises from the grave should have no trouble moving through earth.” Marking her place with an old phone bill, she heaved herself out of the recliner and turned the television on, suddenly needing sound in the apartment.
“This is crazy,” she muttered, opening the book again and reading while she paced. Fantasy and reality were moving just a little too close for comfort, definitely too close foi sitting still.
The remainder of the entry listed the various ways of dealing with the creatures, from ash stakes through mustard seed to the crucifix, going on in great detail about staking, beheading, and burning.
Vicki allowed the slender volume to fall closed and raised her head to look out the window. In spite of the street light glowing less than three meters from her apartment, she was very conscious of the darkness pressing against the glass. For a legendary creature, the methods of its destruction seemed to be taken very seriously indeed.
Behind the police barricade, something crouched low over the piece of sidewalk where the fourth body had been found. Although the night could hide no secrets from him and, unlike the others who had searched, he knew what to search for, he found nothing.
“Nothing,” Henry murmured to himself as he stood. “And yet there should be something here.” A child of his kind might be able to hide its tracks from human hunters but not from kin. He lifted his head and his nostrils flared to check the breeze. A cat—no, two—on hunts of their own, rain that would fall before morning, and. . . .
He frowned, brows drawing down into a deep vee. And what? He knew the smell of death in all its many manifestations and laid over the residue of this morning’s slaying was a faint miasma of something older, more foul, almost familiar.
His memories stretched back over four hundred and fifty years. Somewhere in there. . . .
The police car was almost up on him before he saw it and the tiny sun in the heart of the searchlight had begun to glow before he moved.
“Holy shit! Did you see that?”
“See what?” Auxiliary Police Constable Wojtowicz stared out her window at the broad fan of light spilling out from the top of the slowly moving car.
“I don’t know.” PC Harper leaned forward over the steering wheel and peered past his partner. “I could’ve sworn I saw a man standing inside the barricades just as I flipped the light on.”
Wojtowicz snorted. “Then we’d still be able to see him. Nobody moves that fast. And besides,” she waved a hand at the view out the window, “there’s nowhere to hide in that.” That included the sidewalk, the barricades, and an expanse of muddy lawn. Although black shadows streamed away from every irregularity, none were large enough to hide a man.
“Think we should get out and look around?”
“You’re the boss.”
“Well. . . .” Nothing moved amid the stark contrast of light and shadow. Harper shook his head. The night had been making him jumpy lately; exposing nerves and plucking at them. “I guess you’re right. There’s nothing there.”
“Of course I’m right.” The car continued down the block and she reached over to shut the searchlight off. “You’re just letting all this vampire stuff in the press get to you.”
“You don’t believe in vampires, do you?”
“Course not.” Wojtowicz settled more comfortably into her seat. “Don’t tell me you do?”
It was Harper’s turn to snort. “I,” he told her dryly, “have been audited.”
Back on the lawn, one of the shadows lay, face pressed against the dirt, and remembered. The scent was stronger here, mixed a third part with earth and blood, and it brushed away the centuries.
It was London, 1593. Elizabeth was on the throne and had been for some time. He’d been dead for fifty-seven years. He’d been walking back from the theater, having just seer the premiere presentation of Richard the Third. On the whole, he’d enjoyed himself although he had a feeling the playwright had taken a few liberties with the personality of the king.
Out of a refuse-strewn alleyway, a young man had stumbled—thin and disheveled but darkly handsome, very drunk, and, clinging about him like his own personal bit of fog, had been that same smell.
Henry had already fed from a whore behind the theater, but even if he hadn’t, he would not have fed from this man. The scent alone was enough to make him wary, the not quite sane glitter in the dark eyes had only added further warning.
“Most humbly, I beg your pardon.” His voice, the voice of an educated man, had been slurred almost beyond understanding. “But I have been in Hell this night and am having some small difficulty in returning.” He’d giggled then, and executed a shaky bow in Henry’s direction. “Christopher Marlowe at your service, milord. Can you spare a few coppers for a drink?”
“Christopher Marlowe,” Henry repeated softly into a night more than four hundred years after that unhappy man had died. He rolled onto his back and gazed up at the clouds closing ranks over the stars. Although he had read the play just after its posthumous publication in 1604, he wondered tonight for the first time just how much research Marlowe had done before writing The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus.
“Vicki, it’s Rajeet. Sorry to call so late—uh, it’s 11:15, Monday night, I guess you’ve gone to bed—but I figured you’d want to know the results of the tests. You have positive matches with both Ian Reddick and Terri Neal. I don’t know what you’ve found, but I hope it helps.”
Five
“. . . although the police department refuses to issue a statement at this time, the Coroner’s Office has confirmed that Mark Thompson, the fifth victim, has also been drained of blood. A resident, who wishes to remain nameless, living in the area of Don Mills Road and St. Dennis Drive, swears he saw a giant bat fly past his balcony just moments before the body was found. Jesus H. Christ.” Vicki punched the paper down into a tightly wadded mass and flu
ng it at the far wall. “Giant bats! No surprise he wants to remain nameless. Shit!”
The sudden shrill demand of the phone lifted her about four inches out of her chair. Scowling, she turned on it but at the last instant remembered that the call might be business and modified her response accordingly. A snarled, “What!” seldom impressed potential clients.
“Private investigations, Nelson speaking.”
“Have you seen this morning’s paper?!”
The voice was young, female, and not instantly identifiable. “Who is this, please?”
“It’s me. Coreen Fergus. Have you seen this morning’s paper?”
“Yes, Coreen, I have, but. . . .”
“Well, that proves it then, doesn’t it.”
“Proves what?” Tucking the phone under her chin, Vicki reached for her coffee. She had a feeling she was going to need it.
“About the vampire. There’s a witness. Someone saw it!” Coreen’s voice had picked up a triumphant tone.
Vicki took a deep breath. “A giant bat could be anything, Coreen. A blowing garbage bag, the shadow of an airplane, laundry falling off another balcony.”
“And it could also be a giant bat. You are going to talk to this person, aren’t you?”
It wasn’t really a question and although Vicki had been deliberately not thinking about trying to find an unnamed source in the rabbit warren of apartments and townhouses around St. Dennis Drive, talking to “this person” was the next logical step. She reassured Coreen, promised to call the moment she had any results, and hung up.