by Jeffrey Ford
He could tell by the silhouette of her braids in the light from the streetlamp and her trim figure it was Kiara. “Here we go,” he said.
“I’m going to stay beside her and see if I can help in some way,” said Melody.
Owen was going to answer, but by then, Kiara had taken out her cell phone and dialed his number. He was reeled into his body and he instantly heard his cell phone ringing next to him on the night stand. He answered it. She spoke in a whisper. “What did you see?” she said.
“He was in the attic. Melody says there’s an unlatched window in a window well at the back of the house. You just have to find it and push it open. Let yourself in.”
“Got it,” she said.
“Be careful,” he called out, but she’d already hung up. He pictured her taking the long-barreled revolver with the phosphorous shells out of the bag that hung across her shoulder. When she had the gun in hand, she slung the bag across her back, pointed the weapon upward, and glided across the street with stealth and grace. The image of her cleared from his mind, and he headed for the kitchen to see if there was another bottle of bourbon squirreled away anywhere.
14
HE WAS SOMEWHERE INTO his second drink when his phone, lying on the kitchen table, rang. It was so unexpected, he nearly jumped out of his chair. He scooped it up, dropped it, and grabbed it again.
“Kiara?” he said into it.
“It’s Melody. I just woke myself in order to tell you, Crenshaw was waiting for her in the basement. It looks to have been a trap. She’s still alive, beat up and locked in that cold room. He’s got her gun. I can’t talk anymore.” The phone went dead.
In gym shorts and T-shirt, Owen slipped on his sneakers and grabbed Mrs. Hultz’s gun. He was in the garage, in the car, and starting it in less than a minute. His heart was pounding as he tried desperately to figure out what to do. He was a librarian, not a vampire assassin like the members of the solar cross. He whispered more curse words in the quick drive than he’d uttered in his entire life. When he got close to the house, he turned off the lights and coasted as quietly as possible behind Kiara’s car. Slipping out of the front seat, he eased the door closed and headed up the street. His respiration was fast and shallow.
He knew there was nothing he could do but blunder in through the basement window and hope the old man might have gone elsewhere. It was pitch black behind the house. Stumbling, and once falling to his knees, he nearly discharged one of his two bullets and lost the element of surprise. After tripping twice, he turned on the flashlight app of his phone. When it first lit the night, it shone on a white figure standing back in the yard amid a semicircle of birch trees, a naked woman with a snake around her waist. The form frightened him and he turned back to the house. He finally found the right window, took a deep breath, and let himself in. He gagged. Melody had been right; it stank like chopped meat gone bad, but on a supernatural level. “God,” he whispered to himself, and put the phone away so as not to give any warning. Lifting the gun, he peered through the dim light to get his bearings.
He headed down a short hallway with a red light at the end of it. Crouched over in an attempt to make himself inconspicuous, he kept his right side to the wall. Every few feet, he stopped and listened carefully. At its end, the hallway opened into a large room lit in red like some scene out of Hell. He saw the vats of blood Melody had mentioned, and the dried-out corpses hung from hooks. It was still too dim to see well, so he felt around the walls for the door to the cold room. Eventually, his hand passed over the doorknob. Trying it, he found the room unlocked. He pulled the door back a sliver. Thinking at first the sound that rose up to be the squeal of the hinges, he quickly realized the noise came from upstairs—an animal sound like a wolf or coyote on the hunt. Growling followed it and he knew Crenshaw was on to him. His gun hand started to tremble.
It was freezing in the room and there was only the dim red light shining in through the open door. What initially looked like a duffel bag leaning against the wall stirred. It exhaled a cloud of steam and staggered upright. It was Kiara. He pulled out his phone and pressed the flashlight app. In the glare from it he saw she had a wicked bump and bruise on the side of her face. “My gun is gone,” she whispered.
He heard the Ambrogio pounding down the stairs at top speed. Stuffing the phone back in his pocket, Owen said, “He’s coming.” She made it to his side and they got clear of the freezer just as a blur moved quickly through the red light. Lifting his gun, he pulled the trigger, but the hammer fell on an empty chamber. Kiara pulled him down to his knees at the last second as a clawed hand swept over their heads.
Owen aimed and pulled the trigger again. There was the click of another empty chamber, nearly bringing tears to his eyes. Then one more time, just as the creature was upon them. A small explosion and the force of the slug stopped the artist in his tracks. He stood up straight in front of them, and Kiara sprang to her feet. On the ascent, she dealt the predator a stiff right to his jaw and a kick to the side of the head. He teetered backward and splashed into a vat of blood. Kiara grabbed Owen’s hand and they fled up the stairs from the basement. How he wished he could bound right out of the house as he could when traveling the night world. They searched frantically for the hallway on the main floor. When they found it, she worked the chain locks and dead bolts to open the front door while he stood back to back with her, the gun up, its single bullet ready to fire.
As Crenshaw reached the main floor, he bellowed, and it was then that Kiara cleared the last lock and flung the door open, and both of them sprinted toward their cars. She told him to meet her at the baseball diamond in the park, which had been a meet-up point they’d discussed. He just had enough time to say OK before she’d leaped into her car and hit the gas. He wished he’d moved faster. Her pulling away left him with a desolate feeling. He got into his own ride and hit the gas. There was no sign of Crenshaw. The birds were singing in full chorus. Sunrise was on its way.
They sat side by side in the bleacher seats, the way he and Melody had the previous night, looking out across the baseball diamond. Owen still held Mrs. Hultz’s gun at the ready. Kiara shook her head and said, “He moved so fast when he first came at me in the basement, I didn’t have a chance to even get a shot off. He put me down with one punch and locked me in the freezer, no doubt for later feeding. It’s a disgrace. I should have been able to do something.”
“Listen,” he said, “I saw firsthand what he did to Feit. I’m surprised you went in there after him. Also, that kick you laid on him was like something out of a movie.”
“The question is, what now?” she said.
“I’m out of ideas. Maybe we should just call the cops and let them handle it. I know a lot of the town’s officers. I could say I was bringing some books to a patron of the library who was laid up, but I went to the wrong house, went in, and saw a dead body. I’m pretty sure they’d check it out.”
“Nah,” she said. “I have to get a better weapon, and I’ve got a small flamethrower back at my apartment. If we send the cops in there, think how many will be killed.”
“Wait,” said Owen, “a flamethrower and dead cops? This whole thing is way beyond my abilities. I’m a small-town librarian on the edge of the pine barrens.”
“You’re in it now. He’s seen us and will be looking for us.”
“OK, we’ll have to come up with something.”
“Good,” she said. “That’ll keep you alert. Now, here’s what we should tell Mrs. Hultz.”
He left the baseball field first and drove home. He’d left the garage open so he could scoot quickly into it without Mrs. Hultz realizing he and Kiara had left in separate cars last night. She arrived in her car two minutes after he’d left the garage. As they walked up the path toward Mrs. Hultz’s front door, the old woman opened it. She held the child wrapped in a blanket and was smiling with sleepy eyes.
“He slept great,” she said. “But I stayed up all night just watching him. It’s been so long since my
own were that new.”
Kiara wove a smooth tale around their having been out all night and their trials and tribulations. By the time he left to go next door, Mrs. Hultz had acquiesced to watch William for two more nights. Kiara added a stack of cash to sweeten the deal. Owen walked her and William to her car. She told him, “I have to kill this fuckin’ thing now, or it’s ultimately going to take my kid.”
“What do you have in mind?” he asked.
“I’m going to hunt him down wherever he is and burn him to a cinder.”
“I’ll be here later, after work; come and get me.”
In the hour he had left to sleep, he had an OBE and traveled to the shade of the oaks on the corner across from the menacing old house. There, he watched the sun rise in the window glass. His ethereal form had never yet known blue sky. It was beautiful, vibrant, with an eerie sense of expectation. The sun was almost fully risen when he heard, from deeper in the shadow of the oaks, a voice say, “I see you.” Owen leaped out of sleep. The voice sounded like it was only two inches behind him. He’d felt the breath of the words against the back of his neck. He knew it wasn’t a dream.
It was a brown suit, white shirt, no tie day. He was exhausted. Luckily, it was quiet at the library. There were whole half-hour patches through the morning when he could lean back in his office chair and nod off. Most who came in knew what they wanted and were gone in minutes. Though there was a young woman who scoured the children’s section. Rubbing his eyes, a little annoyed by her presence, Owen got up and went to see if he could help her find what she was looking for. When he drew closer to the woman, he realized he knew her. It took him a second to place her as she stood and greeted him, and he reciprocated. The final clue was her red hair—it was Shiela Tobac.
“I’m looking for a certain reference book for the project I’m working on,” she said.
Owen said, “Interesting,” but left it at that.
“The book is titled The Daily Reader. It’s a children’s book.”
“I know it,” said Owen. “Stay here for a minute. Let me get it.” He strode into the back room next to his office where the small book hospital was, along with a table stacked with new books to be processed for circulation. He went to the trash bin in the corner and dug down. His hands went directly to it. The Daily Reader rose again like a silver mummy. He brought it to her. “You can keep it,” he said.
“Seriously?”
“Keep it,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s heading for the chopper.”
She thanked him profusely and was gone in a minute. As he headed back to the office, he wondered if Shiela Tobac was subsuming other works of fiction into the ever-increasing, downhill-rolling snowball of her massive story. Immediately upon contact with his chair, he fell into a deep sleep—no traveling, no dreams, just pure oblivion. A solid hour passed without the bell attached to the front door going off. When he woke, he rose to consciousness slowly, like a diver trying to avoid the bends. There was the brutal pressure of so much to deal with in the waking world—monsters and schemes of assassination.
He stood and stretched his arms out, yawning. It was so quiet away from town, near the woods, and no patrons, that he heard a car pull over to the curb out on the street. He left his office to see who was visiting. Although she’d already been in once, he wouldn’t mind seeing Shiela Tobac again. There was something about her mad energy he found enchanting. The car by the curb was a ’70s Buick Skylark, metallic green, like something from his father’s era. He couldn’t imagine Shiela Tobac driving anything so stodgy. The door opened on the driver’s side, the side away from the library, and out stepped a man. He was a little stooped, with a bald head save for a ring of white hair. Owen knew it was Crenshaw.
A vision of his own mutilated corpse, thorax split open and leaking blood all over the children’s section haunted his thoughts. “Shit,” he whispered, and bolted before the old man could look up and see him through the glass door. Owen could taste the adrenaline. His legs felt as weak as in a dream, and his mouth had gone perfectly dry. All he could hear was the sound of his own heartbeat. He made it to the counter and ducked behind it just before he heard the door alarm in his office. The Ambrogio was in the library.
“Mr. Hapstead,” the old man called. “Mr. Owen Hapstead! I’ve come to return the favor of last night.” The voice sounded to be coming from the children’s section. “Mr. Hapstead, meet me tonight in dreamland, why don’t you?”
There was silence, and Owen had to cover his mouth, as he knew he was breathing too desperately.
“My Sleeping Beauty,” came the chilling voice. “It’s disappearing, as perhaps you might soon as well.”
Owen got on his hands and knees and crawled as fast as he could back through his office, down the short hallway, directly to the back door of the library. He slowly stood up and remained motionless. Crenshaw was banging on the bell at the counter. “Service, my good man,” he yelled. “Service.” He went on a tirade on the bell, banging it mercilessly, and when that storm of noise was at its most intense, Owen opened the door, which squealed more than he’d have liked, and bolted across the field of weeds toward the woods. It was the fastest he’d ever run, powered by sheer terror. When he reached the cover of the trees, he realized he’d left the pistol in the desk drawer of his office.
He ducked behind a tree and gathered himself into a ball with his arms around his knees. From behind him he heard the back door of the library squeal open. At this point, he was stunned and couldn’t bring himself to look.
“See you tonight,” called the voice across the field. A brief spell later, he heard the door close with a bang. And a few moments after, the old Buick out front started up and pulled away from the curb. Owen waited a good half hour before he ventured into the library. The back door locked on its own, so he had to go around the front. He was afraid the old man had only moved the car a way down the street to then return to ambush him. Eventually, it was clear he was gone for good, although Owen’s fear of him pouncing never diminished.
In his office, on his desk, Owen found a painting, 10×13, done in a reddish-brown color. It took him a minute to process what he was looking at. At the same time, he realized the piece was a portrait of him and Melody in the night world, Crenshaw cutting their silver cords with his monstrous incisors. It had surely been executed in that poor fellow’s blood who was suffering his last on the gurney on the third floor of the old man’s house. The gore had not completely dried in one small patch, and the canvas stank like death. He lifted the painting with a pen shoved under the back of the frame and walked it directly outside to the dumpster behind the library, lifted the lid, and let it and the pen drop in. On his walk back to the front door, he allowed himself to stop breathing through his mouth.
15
KIARA AGAIN DROPPED WILLIAM off at Mrs. Hultz’s place. The story this time was that she was just starting at a night job and she needed someone to watch William for a couple of shifts until a sitter from an agency was due to start. After she left her son, she went next door to Owen’s. She didn’t knock but just pushed open the door and walked in. He was in the kitchen, waiting. On the table in front of him were the pistol and a cup of coffee. He got up and poured her a cup. “You want anything in it?” he asked. She shook her head and sat down across from him.
“I’ve got news,” said Owen. “He’s coming for us in the night world tonight. He was at the library today to stoke my fears.”
She smiled. “Which means he’s going to be sleeping somewhere. I’ve got the flamethrower in my car. I’ve also got a new pistol, fully loaded with phosphorous rounds from a member of the solar cross. He drove down from New York last night.”
“So, we’ll try to keep the painter busy in the night world while you find and fry him.”
She nodded. “You two don’t have much protection against him.”
“I don’t know. Melody has hinted at a way of gaining physical advantage for a few moments. Not sure what she meant, but she’s a rea
l adept. She comes to the night world with an entire philosophy and code of ethics passed down from earlier generations. She’s something special.”
“Well, I hope she’s good at running, too,” said Kiara.
“By now, we’re both good at that.”
She told him how she and William had been on the run for the last couple of days, unable to go back to their apartment. Before leaving, at the door, she said, “I’ll try to get him fast.”
“It would be greatly appreciated.”
He paced back and forth across the living room, impatient for sundown and the weary feeling, before he gave in for the night and went to bed. Eventually, he cautioned himself that he’d have to relax if he was going to get to sleep. Practicing the deep diaphragm breathing technique he’d learned in a college yoga class and hadn’t used since, he sat in the corner of the couch with the light off and the TV quietly playing some black-and-white tearjerker from the ’40s. He pushed out the thoughts of Crenshaw with the realization that his current life between home and the library had grown stale. He used the time behind his closed eyes, amid the purposeful breathing, to sort out where he wanted to be in a few more years. It struck him for the first time that his existence was like something out of an ill-conceived afterlife. He followed his own arguments here and there and so deeply, he woke to the night world, standing up in his phantom form from the couch.
He yawned and walked through his front door and out onto the street. It was a soft, beautiful night of stars. Still, the breeze insisted. He felt a great sense of anxiety in it, as if everything was aware something was about to happen. Melody stood on the corner beneath the streetlamp, her arms folded. She appeared deep in thought as he approached her. She looked up and smiled, and he said, “I have a question for you.”
“OK.”
“How did you know my phone number the other night to call and warn me about Kiara being trapped?”