A single lamp at the far end of the room bathed the front hall in an orange light. It dazzled her eyes for a moment and she turned away to let her pupils adjust. It was warm inside, warm enough to make her uncomfortable in her winter coat. When she could see clearly again she looked around and saw a Persian carpet on the floor and overstuffed armchairs around a round wooden table. It looked like the perfect setup for a séance. To her left a grand staircase curled up toward a second-floor gallery. On the wall before her hung a huge tapestry, black with gold embroidery showing a snake swallowing its own tail. Inscribed in the circle the snake made were the words WE SHALL ALL RETURN.
Caxton looked up the stairs. She could almost imagine Astarte making a stately entrance down the wooden steps, wearing a dowdy old dress, her hair up in a loose bun. It was how she had imagined the woman when they spoke on the phone, though honestly, she had no idea what Jameson’s widow actually looked like.
Doors led off the foyer in three directions, but they were all closed. Jameson could be hiding behind any of them, she knew. Forcing herself to breathe calmly, she tried to pay attention to the hairs on the back of her arms, to the sensitive skin behind her ears. If he was close she would feel him, feel the aura of wrongness that vampires exuded. She made herself wait for five seconds before she decided she couldn’t feel a thing.
Then she heard something and nearly jumped out of her skin. It was a very soft sound, a faint pattering, reminding her of the sound snow made when it fell. It came from the base of the stairs. Caxton moved closer, but the shadows cast by the single lamp made it impossible for her to see anything there. She reached into her pocket and took out her Mag-Lite. Switching it on, she played its beam across the bottom three steps.
The sound came again. She twitched her light to the left and saw where it was coming from. A thin trickle of blood was dripping down the steps, dropping gently on each riser. She lifted the light higher and followed the trail of blood all the way up to the landing above.
Trying to move quietly, trying not to breathe too raggedly, she started up the stairs, keeping her feet on the woven runner that lined each step. Keeping her flashlight handy, she brought her gun up to the level of her shoulders, ready to shoot anything that popped its head over the banister. When she reached the landing she turned left, then right, covering both ends of the gallery, but nothing showed itself.
The blood trail started under a doorway directly ahead of her. It gleamed in electric light that shone around the edge of the door, which stood slightly ajar. Caxton tapped the door gently with the back end of her Mag-Lite and it swung easily back and away from her, revealing the room beyond.
The light inside wasn’t much brighter than the single lamp down in the foyer. It showed her enough, though: A narrow room almost filled by a large four-poster bed and a chest of drawers. A tall stand that looked like a perch for a parrot or some other kind of bird, currently unoccupied. Framed black-and-white photographs hung on the walls, but Caxton didn’t bother to examine their subjects.
Lying on the bed was a woman about forty-five years old. She was dressed smartly in a maroon mid-length skirt and a black silk blouse. Her chin-length hair was almost pure silver, save for a single streak of coal black that curled around her very pale cheek. Her eyes stared at the ceiling, but they didn’t see anything. The blood that pooled on the floor and ran out onto the landing came from her right arm, which hung down from the side of the bed so the curled fingers almost brushed the rug.
Her wrist had been torn open right to the artery. As bad as the wound was, considering what vampiric teeth were capable of the wound looked almost gentle, as if Jameson had retained enough humanity to want to make his wife’s passing as painless as he could. Caxton checked the woman for a pulse and found none, as she had expected. He had always been thorough. There was no doubt in Caxton’s mind that this was Astarte, and that her husband had been her murderer.
Caxton closed her eyes and lowered her weapon. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried to make it here in time.” Foolish, she knew, talking to a corpse. Yet the feeling that she had failed here, that the woman’s death was her fault, could not be shaken.
She turned to go. There were plenty of other rooms to be searched, and maybe some actual evidence to be turned up. She took a step out of the room and then another toward the stairs. Below her, in the foyer, the single burning lamp was smashed just then and darkness closed on the first floor like a curtain being drawn. Caxton heard someone moving down there, clumsily bouncing off the furniture, and someone else hiss in disgust. Two people, at least—and she didn’t think either of them was Glauer.
20.
Caxton stepped backward into the room where she’d found Astarte’s body. She thought about closing the door behind her, but the only light in the house was coming from the doorway. If she closed it, anyone downstairs would know she was there when the light was cut off. Instead she crouched on the far side of the bed, where anyone passing by the open door wouldn’t be able to see her.
There was one problem with that, of course. There was no other way out of the room. She had got herself stuck in a corner with nowhere to go. Assuming the people downstairs intended her harm—a safe assumption, if there ever was one—they could come for her any time they liked and she would be hard-pressed to defend herself with her back up against the wall.
Jameson had taught her better than that. He’d taught her more than once not to get herself into exactly that situation. She needed to move. She needed to think straight. Fear was clogging up her brain. She needed to shake it out, to start being smart again.
What did she know? There were multiple persons inside the house with her. She was pretty sure none of them were vampires. The hair on her arms was lying flat and she had no sense at all of vampiric corruption nearby. That meant the intruders were probably half-deads. She could handle a couple of them without too much trouble. She’d learned a lot from Jameson about how to fight dirty and keep her opponents guessing. This wasn’t going to be an easy fight, though. The intruders had darkened the house and presumably they were lying in wait for her, ready to ambush her as soon as she showed herself. She had no idea how many of them there were, either. A lone half-dead was weak and slow, but in groups the murderous bastards could be dangerous.
She thought about her options. She could rush down the stairs, make a break for the front door. Once through she could get to her car and escape. That was assuming they weren’t waiting by the door, and that they hadn’t left any traps for her along the way. It would be very stupid to make that assumption.
A far better plan would be to signal Glauer and have him come rushing in with a shotgun blast to scare the hell out of the intruders. Jameson had always maintained that half-deads were cowards at heart. If Glauer surprised them enough they might just scatter, allowing her to escape without actually having to fight them at all.
Caxton reached into her pocket for her cell phone, so she could call Glauer and set up a surprise attack. Her hand found the bottom of her pocket but didn’t find the phone. She cursed silently when she realized she’d left it back in the car. She could still signal him by shouting for his help (screaming seemed undignified, even if that was the signal they’d agreed upon). Doing so would of course alert every half-dead in the area to her presence and give them a bead on her location. They could be on her like a plague of locusts before Glauer could get through the door.
If the room she was in had possessed a window she could have opened it and looked down at the back of the house. From there she could have signaled Glauer somehow. The room did not possess a window. But maybe one of the other rooms on the second floor did.
It was worth a try, she decided. Moving slowly, keeping very low, she crept around the bed and past Astarte’s dangling arm. She crouch-walked through the pool of blood on the floor—it made her a little queasy to think that she was walking through someone’s spilt-out life, but she’d been through worse before—and out through the door.
&nb
sp; She could hear the half-deads moving about below her on the ground floor. She heard drawers yanked open and what sounded like someone rummaging through a pile of cutlery. The half-deads were arming themselves, she thought, divvying up the steak knives in the kitchen. Their beady little eyes were probably shining with glee. Half-deads never used guns, because their decaying bodies lacked the coordination necessary for aiming a firearm. They loved knives, though. Passionately.
Keeping her back against the wall, Caxton slid to her right, toward the nearest door on the gallery. She passed across its width, then reached back to turn the cut-glass knob. The door opened with the barest of creaking noises, but she stopped and stood perfectly still, listening. The half-deads were still about their business in the kitchen—they must not have heard her. She pulled the door open further and peered inside.
Neat stacks of folded white blankets and tablecloths sat on shelves inside, smelling of old, clean cotton. She had found the linen closet.
No time to curse her luck, she thought. She glanced over the gallery railing into the darkness below, looking for any sign of movement. The only light came from the flashers on the cruisers inside, which occasionally stabbed a blue or red beam through the first-floor windows. Anything could have been down there and she wouldn’t have seen them, even if they were moving around; the strobelike effect of the flashers ruined her dark-adapted vision every time they cycled through.
Moving as silently as she could, she pushed onward to the next door down. Neither the light of the flashers nor the softer light from Astarte’s room reached up that far. She had her Mag-Lite still, but she didn’t dare use it. In the deep gloom she ran a hand over the door’s polished surface, then found a brass plate with a keyhole in it. She lifted her hand a few inches and found a cracked porcelain knob that turned with a barely audible squeal. Slowly she opened the door, an inch or two at a time, ready to stop the instant the hinges creaked. Just a little more. Once she had it open wide enough she would slip in and close it just as carefully behind her.
A high-pitched scream tore through her consciousness and a once-human body slammed into her, knocking her down. She could only register that its breath was horrible as he pushed her down to the carpet. She saw a long weapon glint as it was raised high—a meat fork, it looked like, a foot long and with four wicked barbed tines—and then it was all she could do to throw her head to one side as the fork came down right where her left eye had been. The half-dead on top of her screamed again and she saw the tattered skin of its face jiggle, felt spittle fleck her cheeks and upper lip. It tried raising its fork for another attack but couldn’t. The tines had gotten stuck in the wooden floor.
Caxton had been trained in some very basic martial arts, so she knew what to do next. She got one knee between her attacker’s legs and pushed up with all her strength. Whether half-deads had sensitive testicles or not was a moot point; the maneuver was intended to roll the thing off of her body, and it worked. She could have followed up by rolling on top of it and pinning its arms down, but she didn’t bother taking the move that far. Instead she yanked her Beretta out of its holster and shoved the barrel up under the half-dead’s chin. Its eyes went wide just before she squeezed the trigger, but afterward what was left of its face went slack.
She took a second to study the dead thing, trying to figure out who it had been and what it was doing in the house. One look at its clothes told her the whole story.
It was dressed in the gray shirt and navy blue pants of a Pennsylvania state trooper. One of her own. Jameson must have been waiting in the house when the troopers broke in. He would have made short work of them. Though she had tried to warn them what dangers awaited inside, she had known when she sent the troopers in that they weren’t prepared or trained in how to fight a bloodthirsty monster. Once he killed them they had become his to play with, and he must have raised them from the dead even before Caxton arrived on the scene. That was why there had been no bodies in the cars out front—because the bodies had already been inside the house.
There could be as many as six more half-deads inside the house, then. She didn’t have time to feel guilty.
As fast as she could, she rolled over and jumped to her feet. She peered through the door her attacker had come through and saw the room beyond, a kind of butler’s pantry lined with cupboards. The room also contained a simple table, a few chairs, and at the far end a very narrow staircase leading down. She figured it had to go down to the kitchen. She could already hear more half-deads clattering up those steps.
She thought fast. A brass key stood in the keyhole on the inside of the door. She yanked it out, slammed the door shut, and locked it from the outside. When the mechanism clicked she hit the key with the butt of her weapon, breaking it off inside the lock.
Her next move was easy to figure out. There was no more point in subterfuge. “Glauer!” she shouted, as loud as she could, just in case he hadn’t heard the gunshot. “Glauer! Now!”
21.
The half-deads inside the butler’s pantry hammered on the door and it shook wildly in its frame. It was constructed of thick oak, though, and Caxton thought it would hold awhile.
She rushed to the head of the stairs, still shouting for Glauer. She hoped he could hear her, through the walls of the house. If he couldn’t she was in real trouble. She could hear more half-deads moving around on the ground floor, but she couldn’t see anything. Sweeping her Mag-Lite around the base of the steps revealed nothing but faded carpet and motes of dust that twirled in the light’s beam.
She was going to have to run down there and hope for the best. She had her Beretta, and plenty of ammunition, but she knew better than to think she could shoot accurately in the dark house. Holding her light high and her handgun low, she started down the stairs. She took them carefully, one at a time.
She was halfway down when a knife sailed past her cheek to clatter against the steps behind her. It passed so close to her skin that she could see the brass rivets in its wooden handle and the serrations on the blade—close enough that it made her weave over to one side and lose her balance. She stumbled down three stairs, her left hand lashing out for the banister. She caught it, but in the process her flashlight tumbled free and bounced down the steps. Its jumping, falling light caught the torn face of a half-dead for just a moment, showing the gray, twitching muscles beneath the raveled skin. The creature was smiling broadly—but then the light bounced away again and rolled to the bottom of the stairs, where a pale hand grabbed it up and switched it off.
Caxton crouched low in case another knife came flying up at her and fired two rounds wildly down at the monsters who lay in wait for her. One of them screamed, a high-pitched wail that made her nerves twist, a sound like a cat being thrown into an ice-cold bathtub. It wasn’t a mortal scream, though. She must have just winged her target.
The flare of the gunshots was enough to dazzle her eyes and she was blind. Things had gone from bad to worse, and then they grew worse still. From above she heard the locked door splinter and crack and finally burst out of its frame. Hurried footsteps came rushing down the gallery toward her.
Unable to see, surrounded on every side, she did the only thing she could think of. Caxton’s hand was still on the banister. She holstered her pistol, grabbed the banister with her other hand, and then vaulted over the side of the staircase into empty, lightless space.
Almost instantly her feet struck the top of the round séance table. Unable to see where she was going to land, she had braced herself to drop all the way to the carpet, maybe eight feet down. She hadn’t been prepared for the table to be in the way, and her feet went out from under her. Painfully she struck the table with her side and then half rolled, half dropped to the carpeted floor.
“Where’d she go?” one of the half-deads demanded.
“I can’t see her!” another replied.
Caxton knew from past experience that the half-deads could not see in the dark any better than she could. Unlike their vampiric mast
ers, they were at as much of a disadvantage as she. Yet they benefited from the darkness anyway. Her only advantage had been the range of her Beretta, which would have allowed her to pick them off before they could reach her with their knives. In the blackness that advantage was lost—if she couldn’t see, she couldn’t aim. If she couldn’t aim, she might be better served just swinging the butt of her handgun back and forth and hope she pistol-whipped them all to death.
She could try to find a light switch—but in the process she would probably knock over an ottoman or a candelabra or something and give away her position.
Where the hell was Glauer? She had gotten out of one ambush but only ended up in a spot nearly as bad. The little flashes of red and blue light coming in the windows showed her nothing at all where she lay behind the table. She could hear the half-deads moving through the foyer, spreading out to find her.
Time for another silent profanity to climb across her lips. When a victim was raised as a half-dead its soul died first, its personality wiped away and replaced with nothing but hatred and gleeful bloodlust. Yet it retained some part of his memory. These half-deads had been cops once. They’d been trained in how to search a room and how to keep a subject from escaping. She had no doubt they would cover the three doors that led off from the foyer. She had moments—mere seconds before she was surrounded.
Both ankles ached as she pushed herself up against the rear wall of the room and got her feet under her again. She didn’t think any of her bones were broken, but even if they were she needed to move fast. Thinking her best bet was to move toward the back of the house, she pushed her way along the wall, feeling for the tapestry she’d seen on her way in. There—her hand touched the cloth, grabbed a corner of it. The door was just on the far side. She reached forward for its knob—and then yanked her hand back when the door jumped and thudded as if someone behind it was hammering to get out.
Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale Page 10