“Pleasantly?”
“Somewhat. I was ... you know ... awkward, afraid ... unsure...”
“First time, a joy. Suppose I told you I wanted you to do Stroud?”
She shivered at the suggestion from intense agitation and an overwhelming desire to do exactly as he asked, but if she did so and somehow it was misconstrued by the others ... wouldn't it come back to haunt her? Suppose Banaker needed someone to take a fall? Suppose Banaker knew who the man-eater really was, but he didn't want him caught and punished? Suppose he needed her as a scapegoat?
“Calm all your fears, Pamela, please.” He knew what she was thinking. He had that capability. He had more power than any of them. “It's Stroud I want. I owe his family a great deal, you see. I owe it to him to give you to him.”
“When?” she asked.
“Tonight ... tonight. He'll welcome you into his arms and you'll take his life--all of it. No holding back, Pamela. No storing him away somewhere for later drams; no show of pity; no turning him into your fucking pet, all right? All or nothing. What do you say? It could get you moved up on the ladder here. I happen to be most influential, you know.”
She also knew he did not tolerate mistakes or failures very well. “What if he doesn't, you know, welcome me to him?”
He laughed again. “What man could resist you?”
“But if something happens to--”
“Get him for me, Pamela,” he said sternly, his eyes freezing her in place. “Kill Stroud.”
There were levels in Banaker's “family” just as there were in any family, a natural pecking order. There were the weak drones at the bottom rungs, most like zombies, some of whom worked out of the brain-dead condition to improve their status--especially if they followed Banaker's prescription for improvement: his Pire Regimen. It started with ox blood and iron and ended with human blood, large quantities of plasma and his secret ingredient. Some were content to remain as they were, however, acting as gofers and go-betweens, never acquiring full status or recognition in the “Pire Family.” Others were hard-working, and then there were the driven like himself--few and far between. His father had been driven. He was obsessively driven, never sleeping, always at the helm of his empire. But Dolphin he worried about.
Dolphin's mother was gone and the loss had shattered the boy. Dolphin's mother had died at the hands of Ananias Stroud, trapped by him outside the sleeping place, dissolved in the then killing rays of the sun. Dolphin never understood the reasons until he was older, and he still did not fully appreciate the benefits of research that had armed him and his kind with additional resistance to such things as light.
“You and the others,” Dolphin had shouted at him once, “you're just becoming like them! More and more like humans every day! Where's the dignity and heritage in that, my father? Safety ... all you think of is safety so you might hide in full view of them.”
Banaker had slapped his son hard across the face and the boy had stormed out that night. The next morning he hadn't returned, had holed up somewhere he would not discuss, and the newspapers told of Dr. Cooper's missing son.
Cooper had been a remarkable project himself. He was one of them, but he had married a human and they'd sired little Ronnie. It was not a first, as it had been accomplished in the distant past, but it was rare. The attention showered Ronnie over the years had caused a jealousy to build in the much older but vulnerable Dolphin and Banaker knew that Dolph hated Ronnie and his father.
With the Meyers boy's disappearance, Banaker feared the worst--that one of his kind had broken ranks ... and deep inside he feared it was Dolph. He'd gone to him after the Meyers incident had gotten the attention of the city. He had pleaded with Dolph to deny it.
Deny it, he did, but Banaker didn't believe him. He followed Dolph when he stormed out this time and he found the Meyers boy and his dog, both looking dead, hanging in a cocoon spun of the ectoplasmic vomit of his species, at the back of a cave filled with bats.
Dolph had drained the dog completely. But the Meyers boy was still breathing, just barely so, but breathing. Banaker had the boy hours before he released the news, bringing his blood supply back to normal, but he hadn't been able to bring him from his shock, nor did he completely wish to.
That morning he had confronted Dolphin with the evidence. Dolph shouted and kicked for some time before he finally settled down to listen to reason, to the fact it meant the salvation of their species. “And for that any price, any price is worth it, Dolph! You must know that!”
“Yes, I know ... I know.”
“Then why? Why're you doing this?”
Dolph couldn't look him in the face. “I ... I get urges, Father ... urges that I can't control.”
“Ronnie Cooper was only half human, Dolph!” he had said with a groan. “He was one of us.”
“I didn't do Ronnie!”
True, he hadn't found Ronnie's body. Nobody had.
“Then why the Meyers boy, why?”
“The kid found the bone field, the one where we buried all the used bones for your goddamned extractions.”
“Then you only made a bad situation worse! And you just used it as an excuse, Dolph! An excuse to become a man-eater. Don't you know I know what's in your heart, your mind?”
“I got a right to know what it's like! Damn you, Father, damn you and Grandfather and the Institute and the research and all of it!”
“Don't use that tone with me!”
“What're you going to do, cut back my rations? I don't want any of your goddamned freeze-dried, prepackaged plasma!”
He took hold of the boy and, with his power, all that the ages had given him, forced Dolphin into submission before him, a thing he did not wish to do. “I don't wish to humiliate you, son ... but if I must.”
Dolph felt the power and the pain exerted on his body and mind by his father. It was excruciating, the pain of the grave, pain of hunger, eternity without a drop of blood.
“Now, son, let's talk openly and rationally, the way a father and son should. You know, your having my and your mother's genes and blood, you realize you are one of the few fullbloods left among us? That while others've become vampires, son, you were born a Pire!”
“Yes, Father ... you've told me.”
“Is that it ... just testing your power? Trying your wings, as they say?”
“Part of it. Just never tasted the real thing before and now that I have...”
It truly was not difficult for Banaker to understand Dolph's improprieties and uncontrollable urges. Even now, as old as he was and as workable as blood substitutes were, he sometimes felt a passionate desire to abandon science and the future of the species for an orgiastic night of debauchery and blood--real blood from a real man--to become again the man-eater that his forebears were. It was more than an urge, it was instinct and a driving force from the deepest part of his black soul.
He understood the wild boy for he himself had indulged in the old ways some thirty-four years earlier when he was about Dolph's age. And, from time to time, he'd gone on “business” trips, picked up hookers in bars, and had feasted unashamedly on them in such places as Washington, D.C., where the last AMA Convention was held. To his knowledge, the bodies were found but not autopsied; who autopsied hookers with needle tracks up and down their arms and one large one on their necks?
His most foolish acts had, however, been accomplished here in Andover. It'd been the year of his rape of Andover, reaping in his human harvest. It had been his first but not his last taste of the real stuff. He'd gone on a madcap, bloodthirsty rampage; much of his anger, rage, and passion had been, he determined years later, directed at his own father--to get back at him for being his father, he supposed. Even vampires had psychological difficulties and dependencies.
Now Dolphin was repeating the cycle.
The father-son thing; a vicious pattern.
Dolph's little improprieties were meant to bring his father down along with Andover--to his knees. All the young fool was accomplishin
g, however, was to draw a too bright spotlight of endless questions down around the Institute.
“It will end, Dolph. You must get control of your inner urges and purge yourself. Meantime, the only help for it is the substitute, the enriched blood plasma I give you, son. You must understand: you must care for the rest of the family.”
Dolph only frowned. Perhaps he didn't care a fig about the others of his kind; perhaps he was just too young and too spoiled to understand, to fully appreciate all that his ancestors had built here in sleepy little Andover. Perhaps Banaker had raised a sociopathic vampire son. Perhaps Dolph liked the hunt and the taste of blood too much to ever give it up? What then?
“Maybe I'll just move out on my own,” he said sullenly, looking to his father for a reaction. “Get a place in Springfield, St. Louis, maybe ... or maybe Chicago.”
Banaker knew what he was doing. He knew that Dolph was taunting him. Dolph knew he wanted him to take charge of the Institute one day, manage things so that Banaker could plunge back into research. Such talk as what Dolph threatened now was designed merely to tear and rend Oliver Banaker's heart. For half a second, Oliver felt what his own father must have felt at such moments with him.
He would not provide the boy with the tools to destroy him, however, and he'd be damned before he would show any sign of weakness before Dolph. He merely said, “Do as you damned well please, Dolph, but you will not expose the rest of us to annihilation by your stupidity and arrogance. And should you ... should you further do so--”
“You'll what? Kill me?”
“If that is what it takes, yes.”
“You don't have it in you!”
Banaker stalked out on his son this time to the boy's insulting chorus: “You don't have the guts, Father! You don't have it in you, because you drink that milkshake crap at the Institute!”
He turned and rushed at his child, his form turning into a black missile that slammed into Dolph, knocking him over. Dolphin opened his eyes to the enormous, salivating mouth and fangs of his father as they clamped down on his neck, rending a portion of the skin and beginning to drain his blood. Dolph countered by shape-changing even as he was being held in his father's grip, the fangs pumping the life from him. As each changed into his true form, a wind swept through the house, blasting everything in its path. The unfurled, black wingtip of the struggling pair cut walls and broke mirrors in their path.
Suddenly Banaker returned to his human form, spent. His son lay beneath him, the speed with which the attack had been launched had left him weak and wounded. Dolph, too, had returned to his former self.
“Lie there in your own blood, Dolph, and think about it! Think about it real hard. I want an end to this business you've been carrying on out there!” He pointed in the general direction of the doorway before he stormed through it and was gone.
That had been just after recovering the Meyers boy, but just before the incident at Spoon River. Banaker knew his little “talk” had failed.
He also knew that others in the family were beginning to suspect Dolph--nothing that anyone said directly to his face, but little things, like the way Dolph was being treated lately, and the handful of anonymous “tips” sent Banaker's way. If things were allowed to continue, not only would exposure be a problem, but Dolph could become the victim of a violent end from the others. All it would take was one among them to lead the horde. Like a lot of fathers, Dr. Oliver Banaker labored under a mix of love and anger, pride and disappointment in his son.
-11-
Had Ananias Stroud, like his father before him, ended his life an insane man?
It was a question that Stroud could not avoid, not any longer, not standing here surrounded by the trappings of lunacy that filled the weird, circular chamber at the heart of the stone manse. Stroud had only known his grandfather as a gentle, caring and peaceful man who had died in his sleep. The evidence against this image had been steadily growing since Abe had taken possession of the manse. First the Ashyers' cautious revelations, his discovery of the barred windows and the circular room, its bizarre furnishings, and the old man's secret library of arcane literature dealing with such esoteric hints as how to keep the dead from rising; all this, along with the information about Ananias' own father, Ezeekiel, having died a madman...
It gave him a shudder. Perhaps it was a genetic tendency toward madness or brain disorders, and here he stood, a man given to seizures, visions and chronic ghostly stirrings thanks to the metal band-aid in his head.
The question of his grandfather's mental state at the time of his death had now become overwhelming, inescapable and demanding. Had the grand old man become bitter, detached from reality, warped? Had that warp skewed his sense of morality and decency, turning him into a wicked, sadistic monster who inflicted pain on others? It did not seem possible, and yet before Abe's eyes, all around this room, lay the incontrovertible evidence.
Abe had come again to the center of the house, into the circle of rock where he had run his hand over the dust and cobwebs on a restraining instrument of torture. He'd been sitting here in the comfortable reading chair with a stack of what he now realized to be the old man's books, trying desperately to understand the meaning of this chamber.
Many, if not most, of the books were yellowed with age, their pages dotted with the holes created by feeding micro-organisms. Some pages fell away at the touch, flying from their bindings as if attempting to escape him.
It was a damp, chilly, large room; the air seeped in although no vents were visible. It seemed to be coming from all sides, seeping through the solid walls that were below ground. It reminded Stroud of underground springs he'd made dives in at a constant seventy-two degrees year round.
He had come by way of Great-grandfather's bedroom, somehow familiar with the route now that took him through a closeted room there, into a wardrobe and out the back to a spiral of stairs that descended into the bowels of the place. The descent made him think of Dante's Inferno and of the personal descent into his own black soul where fear and hatred lay alongside him on that battlefield in Vietnam.
He lit his way with an oil lamp that hung on the wall for the purpose, and once at the bottom and inside the ghastly prison, he found other lamps and torches set in the wall. Nothing artificial here.
At present it was a relief to sit and study the simplicity of a roach that skittered into his vision. It ran the gauntlet of mortar between the fieldstone blocks. Cracks in the mortar revealed the fact that earth on all sides was pressing and straining against the circle. Green to gray to black scales and barnaclelike lichens grew on the walls, living, dying, peeling off, ingested by the roaches and other insects, and finally replaced by their sunless, lightless progeny.
It wasn't the most pleasant of places in the manse.
Not even the Ashyers seemed to know of it, or so he thought before he began reading from the various books he'd pulled down from the shelves along one row of the ancient oak shelves. The bookcase itself looked as if it had made an ocean voyage from Europe several centuries before. How it came to be here was yet another mystery. How and why the old man had such books in his possession as that entitled Life, Death and Demonic Possession, published in 1692 by an Austrian Monk named Adolph Stroud-Nuebauer in a London press, was yet another mystery. But the conclusions Abe had been drawing from what he saw at every turn seemed no mystery any longer.
A notation in the margin of the book by Stroud-Nuebauer marked him an ancestor. It was one of a thousand notations made in the margins of this and other titles that spoke of a dark preference in reading matter.
Sex Worship, Encyclopedia of Spirits and Vampires, Revelations of the Dead, The Book of the Warlock Race, and an invaluable first edition of Draculagraced the oak bookcase. These shared space with titles published in the fifties such as Seabrook's work on vampires and Tobin's Spirit Guide. More recent books had also been acquired and housed here, books of a more scientific nature: Psychism and the Unconscious; Mind, Flesh and Spirit; Transpowering; DNA and th
e Double Helix as Lifeforce; Hannibal's Medical Compendium, and Gray's Anatomy.
There were also some papers in a manuscript holder which constituted what seemed a series of mad ramblings on magic and protection of oneself through magic and ritual. These were in someone's hand, perhaps his grandfather's. Given his final mindset his handwriting might have changed. But he could not be sure of this.
The notations in the margins of otherwise flawlessly kept first editions, such as Dracula by Bram Stoker, were, however, in Ananias's unmistakable hand; and here, his remarks were unmistakably those of a madman.
Encircled by the eerie, almost talking, almost dripping-with-blood instruments of torture, he read the rantings of a man gone insane. The old man had apparently spent his final days pouring over books dealing with vampire outbreaks and attendant vampire practices and destruction. And how to rid oneself of the demons. He had read of vampires in Bulgaria, Somalia, Rumania, Ireland, Judea, Asia, Russia, England, Jamaica, Haiti, the West Indies, Burma, New Zealand, Kenya, Brazil and other South American locations, as well as Canada and America in a book entitled Vampires on the Continent.
One account told of the Kwakiytl Indian tribe in British Columbia who were flesh and blood eaters.
At the front of the famous Stoker novel about the most infamous of vampires, Dracula, the old man had scribbled two urgent messages that leapt from the copyright page proclaiming the book to be a hundred years old:
This is not a work of fiction, but a collection of diary entries and direct recollections of the parties involved in the incidents of 1897.
Careful reading tells that on destruction of the vampire that Mina was pregnant not with J. Harker's child, but that of Count Dracula!
“To carry on the bad seed,” Abe said aloud in the room.
His voice bounced about as if in echo, but in the echo he thought he heard Ananias's voice say, “Yes ... yes...”
He closed the Stoker book in a mood of complete sadness at the condition of the old man's mind at the time he had exited this life: fevered and fearful and ranting. He'd died in his bed upstairs peacefully, Stroud had been told. Peacefully, no, he did not think so.
Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) Page 11