Dhampire

by Baker, Scott

But perhaps she'd broken free of the hand, was looking for me, not finding me because we were both moving around looking for each other. I sat down at a table in the Lunch Room, an untouched cup of coffee in front of me, waiting until long after the lights had been turned out and the caverns closed for the night, then made a final search and returned to the surface.

  People anticipating the bat flight were beginning to fill the amphitheater. I sat down among them, let myself fade into noticeability.

  The caverns were blazing with ever-increasing brilliance and their energies soothed me, pulsed through me and carried away my weakness and confusion. I accepted the strength they gave me as I had accepted the power to conceal myself, without questioning it.

  The bats came swirling up out of the caves in counterclockwise spirals, flew away. The tourists left. In the gathering darkness I could see the landscape burning with what looked like thousands of silver bonfires.

  I wrapped myself in my unnoticeability, returned to my truck for a length of rope and a flashlight. After a second's thought I discarded the flashlight—with my new sense of vision I could see without it and its beam might give me away to anyone able to penetrate my concealment—and got my knife out of my tool kit.

  As a weapon it was a joke—a Boy Scout-type jackknife with a two-inch blade, a corkscrew, can opener, nail file and screwdriver—but it was all I had.

  Most of the caves I found were insignificant guano-stinking holes or ended in sheer drops of up to hundreds of feet. I explored every cave I could, the silver powerflame with which they burned always giving me all the light I needed to see by; I used my rope when necessary, sometimes jumped crevasses or worked my way around the edges of deep pits when what I could see beyond them looked like it might conceal something.

  It was almost dawn before I found a cave with a different feel to it. The powerflame with which its entrance burned looked no different from the silver fires marking the entrances of the other caves I'd tried, but something about this cave twisted at me, rasped me, yet with none of that undercurrent of almost pleasurable attraction that had been so much of what had made the main caverns so unbearable at first.

  The entrance was free of brush, the ceiling high enough so I could make my way in without stooping. The cave slanted down for about twenty yards, then angled sharply off to the left, ended a few yards further on in a long vaulted chamber.

  Just inside the entrance to the chamber a young couple—both park rangers by the evidence of their discarded uniforms—lay dead, their bloodless bodies covered with hundreds of small dry wounds. There was dried blood on their clothing, on the small khaki blanket on which they must have been lying when they were attacked; blind cave insects swarmed over their bodies as they would have swarmed over baby bats fallen from the roof, crawled in through the small dry wounds to feed on what remained of the muscles and internal organs.

  Ignored by the insects, nine albino bats lay dead and crumpled on the cave floor, their dirty white bodies still shimmering with a faint residue of the power that had been theirs in life.

  They'd only been able to kill nine of the tiny bats before they died. Nine, out of the hundreds we'd seen outside our motel room window.

  There were two sets of footprints in the thin layer of guano covering the cave floor. Small shod footprints skirting the bodies, leading back to a shallow depression where someone might have lain on the guano for a while, then the prints of one shod and one bare foot leading out again.

  And by that shallow depression, Dara's left shoe.

  I searched the rest of the cave, found nothing, no other footprints. Dara had been alone, then, following orders or under compulsion—her fear of me could never have driven her to hide herself here, lying in the rank guano within yards of the dead lovers' desiccated bodies—and now she was gone, could be anywhere.

  I went back to the truck, searched her backpack for something that would tell me more about her, tell me where she came from, who she was. Everything was new, unused; her sleeping bag had never been slept in; I could have duplicated the clothing and camping equipment in twenty minutes at any of a hundred stores.

  When the tourists began arriving for the morning bat watch I asked all of them if they'd seen a black-haired girl with golden eyes and a missing shoe. No one had. Which proved nothing.

  I searched the caverns again, drew strength and support from their vast heartbeat but learned nothing, gained no new powers or abilities.

  At the Grand Canyon Dara had told me that I was supposed to continue with my trip exactly as I'd planned it while waiting for her unseen master's summons.

  He'd killed Alexandra, killed the couple in the cave, and if he wasn't dead he'd probably been the one who'd used the hand of glory to turn our lovemaking into something altogether evil. But I couldn't think of anything else to do.

  * * *

  Chapter Eleven

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  But the other geological wonders I'd planned to visit proved to be just wind- and erosion-sculptured stone, dead and meaningless. I conscientiously looked at everything a tourist was supposed to look at, hoping for I didn't know what—a message that I alone could see or read on the surface of some boulder, a fat man in a checked suit with a collection of dirty postcards he'd insist I examine, a rabbit with a pocket watch who'd tell me to follow him down his hole. But there was no one, nothing, and at last I'd exhausted my list of national monuments, state parks and natural wonders.

  I drove straight through the rest of the way to Chicago. I took no breaks, felt no need for sleep or rest, didn't even bother to get out of the van to stretch at gas stations.

  A quick stop in Chicago to deliver some snakes to Loren Beldon, a herpetologist known for his work with African cobras and mambas with whom I'd kept up an occasional correspondence over the last few years, then on to Boston to drop off the other snakes, and from there to Provincetown, the end of the line, where Larry was waiting to buy my coke. And if no one summoned me, no one contacted me—

  I'd have to find them, track them down. Work my way past the neurotics and the sadists and the showmen to the real black-magic underground, if there was one. Maybe join the Church of Satan in San Francisco to show people I was interested, then let them know who my ancestors were, hope someone would try to recruit me for something. My dealing experience would keep me from giving myself away in all the obvious ways that most of the undercover narcotics agents I'd encountered had given themselves away.

  Try to work my way through my family's self-indulgent and pretentious morbidity to whatever reality might have at one time preceded it. There'd be nothing to be learned from my brother Michael, a social Darwinist whose imagination was limited to schemes for getting his while the getting was good, and even less to be learned from my father, but there might be something in the house itself—some of the old privately printed books in the library, maybe diaries or records hidden away in a trunk in the attic, something like that.

  My Aunt Judith would have known what I needed to know if anyone in the family did, but she was dead, a suicide. Perhaps I could find a way to parlay her collection of grimoires into contacts of some sort.

  My Uncle Peter had spent a year in a Catholic seminary before retreating to his Pennsylvania hermitage; from what little I could remember of him he was slow and stupid, pathologically timid, but perhaps his shyness and stupidity were only pretexts for his solitude, only masks behind which he hid something far more sinister.

  And my Uncle Stephen—he was just an exhibitionist, a publicity-seeking poet of very minor talents who would have traded his obsessive treatments of. decadence and decay for rhapsodies to spring and eulogies of the honored war dead in an instant if he'd thought it would bring him more public attention, but perhaps he'd learned something real while researching his image. If not, there might be some way I could put his morbid reputation to use.

  I could go to Romania, waste months checking out Snagov's Monastery, Castle Bran, Visegard, the palace at Tirgoviste. A sentimental pilgrima
ge.

  And if none of that got me anywhere, back to zero. Research, card catalogs and cross-references while they had Dara, could be torturing or mutilating her. With about as much chance of finding her as a the average graduate student researching his thesis had of being taken on as apprentice to a black magician.

  I could hide myself from people, I could see in the dark, and I didn't seem to need sleep or rest anymore. All of which might have been useful if I'd found out where Dara was and was going after her, none of which would help me find her.

  I didn't get to the zoo where Loren worked until long after it had closed for the night but I'd called ahead and he was waiting for me outside the gates.

  We shook hands and introduced ourselves. He didn't notice my new eyes: I'd experimented with my power to turn people's attention away from me on my way from the caverns, found that I didn't need to use the caverns' energies to make it work and that I could fine-tune the ability, keep people from noticing my silver eyes or, say, that I was holding my hand up in front of their faces while carrying on an otherwise normal conversation with them.

  The gatekeeper unlocked the gate for us and we drove the van up onto the sidewalk in front of the snake house, then worked together bagging the snakes and transferring them to their new cages. Without the theatrics for the customs inspectors it was dull routine, work I'd done a thousand times before, and I wasn't paying much attention to what I was doing.

  Loren had just gone inside with the emerald tree boas and I was reaching into a cage for a Sonoran coral snake when I realized that Dara was there in the truck with me. I couldn't see her or hear her but I could feel her presence, could sense a change not in my surroundings but in myself, in who I was, no longer just the David Pharoh Bathory I'd been reduced to but David/Dara again, a single entity once more. There was no telepathy involved;. I couldn't read her thoughts, but she was alive and she healed and completed me, made me once again that which I should never have ceased to be.

  "Dara?" I asked aloud. Then the coral snake struck. It had slithered up onto my glove while I was distracted and now it held onto the flesh of my inner arms with its short fangs, its delicate red, yellow, and black banded body balanced precariously on the end of my glove while it worked its jaws back and forth so as to get as much poison as possible into my flesh from its stubby grooved fangs.

  And Dara was a dead weight in my mind, smothering me, paralyzing me and keeping me from calling out for help. I stood there, unable to move, looking down at the coral snake, feeling the wound burning, the flesh whitening, a great welt beginning to form—

  At last I broke free of her, refused her, thrust her from me. I yelled to Loren to get the antivenin out of the drawer in back, lost his reply as the dizziness and confusion hit me. The coral snake had lost its perch on my glove, but was holding on with its teeth, dangling unsupported in the air like a short length of bright-banded clothesline. I grabbed it with my other gloved hand, ripped it from my arm and dropped it back in its cage, managed to close the lid on it before I fell.

  My vision was going, everything fading into an unfocused blur, and I couldn't breathe. The first cramps had begun in my muscles and abdomen and my backache was getting worse and worse.

  And I was in a ruined temple. Great blocks of rough stone, the roof open to the sky, grass and weeds growing in the cracks in the floor. A bare-breasted priestess with smooth dark skin who listened to the whispered words of a green-eyed serpent that coiled itself around her, merged with her as she became a green tree, became a golden Queen with the head of a cobra on a throne of ivory in a palace of burning diamonds.

  The Queen looked down on me as I lay there in my agony, reached out to touch my wounded arm with a long golden finger that spread its hood and struck—

  And I was lying on the floor of the truck, Loren bending over me still holding the syringe with which he'd injected the antivenin.

  There was no pain, no dizziness. I tried to sit up, found I could.

  "I think I'm OK now," I said.

  "You shouldn't be." He put down the syringe. "Lie down."

  "No, I'm fine. I've gotten bitten before and I've built up an immunity."

  "If you'd had any real immunity it wouldn't have hit you like that. You're lucky you're not dead."

  "No, really, I'm fine. Look." I held out my arm so he could see that the welt was going away, stood up to prove that I could. "I think the whole thing was psychosomatic. Hysterical. I just panicked."

  "I saw the way it was hanging on to your arm—what happened, exactly?"

  "I don't know. I got distracted for a second and the next thing I knew it'd slithered up onto my glove and was attacking me."

  "Snakes don't do that. Not coral snakes, anyway, even if it seems that that's exactly what this one did. There's got to be some other explanation for its behavior."

  I considered telling him about Alexandra, decided against it. "I know. I let myself get distracted and I must have missed something. But I'm glad I'm getting out of the business anyway. I've just got a few more snakes to drop off in Boston and then I won't have to worry about any more mistakes."

  "Do you have a place to stay tonight?" he asked. "We've got a spare bedroom now that Jim's away to college and you probably shouldn't overexert yourself…"

  "Thanks, but I've already made arrangements to stay with some friends. They'll be expecting me soon."

  "Look, why don't you come inside with me and drink some coffee with me in the office for a while, then I'll drive you over to their house and drop you off. I'll put your van in the back parking lot and pick you up on my way in to work tomorrow if you feel up to driving. If not you can leave the van in the lot until you need it again."

  "Thanks, Loren, but—why don't we finish with the snakes, then I'll sit and drink coffee with you for an hour or so and then if I still feel up to driving you can follow me back to my friends' house and make sure I get there all right. Otherwise I'll do it your way. OK?"

  "OK, but I don't want you taking any more risks tonight. I'll take care of the rest of the snakes for you."

  I agreed, watched as he bagged and transferred the Gaboon viper and the two Australian tiger snakes, as well as the now docile coral snake.

  While we were sitting in his office waiting for the coffee to get hot I asked him if he'd ever been bitten by any of his venomous snakes. He said yes, twice, once by a green mamba and once by one of his cobras. Which gave me an opportunity to remind him of the fact that not only are most snake bites not fatal but that most of the people bitten are snake collectors, and to go from there to a discussion of the exaggerated fear most people have of snakes, and from there on to talking about the various kinds of folklore and superstition surrounding snakes. I don't think he was very interested in the subject but he seemed willing enough to talk about it, probably because he wanted to keep me sitting there where he could observe me and make sure I was all right as long as possible.

  When I finally got around to asking him if he'd ever heard of a goddess with the head of a cobra he shook his head.

  "Not that I can remember. There used to be, let's see, an Egyptian goddess named something like Ua Zit who was portrayed as a cobra with a woman's head. There's a statue of her in one of the museums here. And you've got all sorts of seven-and nine-headed cobras in India, but I don't really know anything about them. Except that in all the pictures of the statues I've seen they've got the heads all wrong and made the teeth look more like sharks' teeth or maybe dogs' teeth than like anything you'd find in a real reptile. You'd do better to check with the reference librarian at the public library if you're really interested."

  We talked and drank coffee for another forty-five minutes or so. I told him I'd call him early the next morning to let him know how I was doing, then drove out to one of the nearby suburbs and parked in front of a random house until he drove away.

  As soon as I was sure he was gone I took the vial of cocaine out from the compartment beneath the baby cobra's cage and snorted four spoo
nfuls. I didn't like the way the drug made me feel—it seemed to dull my perceptions rather than heightening them and there was no exhilaration or freedom in its excitement, only increased anxiety—but I knew it was cutting me off from Dara, building me a wall behind which I was safe from her.

  Or rather, safe from those who were using her against me.

  I found an all-night gas station, refilled the tank and left for Boston. Whenever I started to feel a little calmer I snorted more coke.

  * * *

  Chapter Twelve

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  Sometime during the nights drive I realized that, unless there was some sort of magical or ritual benefit to be derived from killing me, whoever had tried to use Dara and the coral snake to murder me must still think I was a threat to them.

  Which meant either that they thought I knew more about them than I really did, or that they knew some way I could find them or get at them, perhaps some way to use my new abilities against them that hadn't occurred to me yet. And even if they were trying to kill me because they thought I knew something I didn't, there was a chance I could learn what I needed to know from their attempts against me.

  Unless, of course, they succeeded in killing me.

  And as long as they thought there was a chance to get at me through Dara they'd have to keep her alive.

  If my resistance to their first attack hadn't already convinced them they couldn't use her successfully against me.

  If killing me was more important than whatever else they had planned for her.

  And if she wouldn't be more useful to them against me dead than alive.

  (Dara's long slim hand mounted on a wooden rod which merges with the bones of her raggedly severed wrist, the rod jutting from a bath of yellow liquid into which her nerves and tendons, arteries and veins, dangle. On the dark smooth skin of her palm a sigil has been branded and I am trapped within it, staring up at the two naked eyeballs that have been sewn to the tips of her long tapering fingers, staring up at Dara's golden eyes and I can see her there, trapped inside the gold, staring helplessly down at me—)