An Old Friend of the Family d-3

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Very well! If you still doubt me. He is miles from here, nailed like an insect to a specimen board. If any of you still doubt that, I’ll fly with you to show—”

  “Dr. Corday!” Kate screamed out suddenly. “Come in and help us!”

  As if by a magic blow Kate’s outcry cut across all other voices, even Morgan’s, and wiped them into silence. Looking round him, Joe could see that no one was moving. The pressure of the silence was such that it felt like a growing weight. The grip pinioning his arms, though, did not slacken.

  Someone’s voice began a Latin whisper. It seemed to have no purpose other than to relieve the silence.

  Morgan was looking over Joe’s shoulder. The faintest of smiles was on her lips and her adolescent eyes had an expression that he could not read. Never again, though, would he be able to think of her as young in any sense.

  The whisper had trailed away. The stillness in the room was more intense and ominous than before.

  Poach was perhaps the first to move, letting his grip on Joe’s wrists slacken and fall away. Joe saw Kate raise her head. He followed her gaze, in the same direction to which other silent faces were turning now. All were looking down the long vista of the rooms.

  At the end the drapes were now drawn back slightly from the widow. And someone was standing there, a man’s form outlined against an icy city night now cleared of falling snow. The form was motionless as some effigy of wax.

  “I knew,” Morgan murmured. “I think I knew it all along.” Now moving slowly, unsurprised, she turned her back on Joe. She took two steps toward that distant apparition, and her voice rang out boldly: “Come in then, Vlad Tepes! I say it now of my own free will. Enter my house, and we will settle all that lies between us, here and now!”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Silently, with deliberate strides, the distant figure was pacing toward them.

  Poach moved then, with such quickness that for a moment his great bulk seemed an illusion. Before Joe could react, the giant had reached the fireplace, and in an instant the eight-foot wooden spear mounted above it had come down into his hands. Morgan meanwhile backed up slowly, until one hand extended behind her rested on the table’s edge.

  For a long moment no one else stirred. Then, with a broken cry, gray-haired Dickon broke out of the group and stumbled into the next room. There he threw himself at the feet of the one approaching, who halted rather than step on him.

  “Master!” Dickon cried out. “Master, I have never betrayed you. I would not believe that you were dead.”

  “Stand up, fool.” For Joe’s eyes, the face of the speaker was still in darkness. The voice, resonant and commanding, was like Corday’s, and yet unlike. It went on: “This is the new world now, Dickon, have you not heard? Such sniveling ill becomes one who is ready to take his rightful place as a member of the superior race of beings.”

  Dickon’s collapse became total. With his face down on the thick carpet, his words fell into muffled howls. The man whose path he had blocked stepped round him, and continued his advance.

  The fashion model was next to fall upon her knees. “Vlad Tepes,” she choked out, “we did not know . . . we never believed that you were . . .”

  “When have I ever asked for groveling?” the newcomer interrupted. “From any of you?” He took one more step, and Joe could see that he wore Corday’s face—and yet he did not. Like the voice, the face had been transformed. He who was not that old man Joe had known—and yet was—took yet another step. He stopped there, in a position from which he could see Poach and Morgan both.

  In Morgan’s left hand, held behind her back as if for support against the table, there had somehow appeared a long knife. In the table lights it looked to Joe as if it had been fashioned blade and all from one piece of some dark and oily wood. Near the fireplace, Poach stood poised like a harpooner with his wooden spear. The bloody mark on his forehead was throbbing now, looking almost raw.

  For the moment, the two breathing people in the room were being ignored by everyone else. Joe saw that Kate’s eyes were fixed, calculatingly, on the knife in Morgan’s hand; all right, let Kate do something about that. Joe’s left hand moved out stealthily over the surface of the table in front of him. His fingers touched and picked up a stub of pencil. If only it were not too big around—

  “Watch out!” he yelled, and heard Kate’s voice ring out in chorus with his own.

  Had their warning been needed, it would have come too late, for Morgan’s swift strike had taken them both by surprise. The old man had been ready, though. He was out of the path of the knife-blow when it arrived, and with a whiplash of his arm he slapped Morgan staggering back. Joe saw him vanish then. Poach’s lunge with the spear found only air.

  An explosion of frightened voices filled the room. All around, solid bodies were going out like candle flames. There was a howling exodus in the air. Joe had drawn his gun at last, and now he got himself in front of Poach. The giant was looking past Joe, holding the spear ready, seeking for Corday. Joe slid the pencil stub eraser-first down the snub barrel of the .38, felt it check in place, rubber against chambered load.

  Poach’s eyes widened, discovering something behind Joe. Keeping the spear for bigger game, Poach lifted a free hand to sweep the irritation of a mere armed policeman from his path.

  The revolver blasted once, and Joe’s mind registered that at least it had not blown up in his hand with a jammed barrel. The hammerblow of the wooden impact slammed Poach’s head backward, one side of his forehead disappearing in a great smear of jellied blood. The spear fell from the giant’s hands, and the roar he uttered drowned out other shouting voices.

  Though staggered, Poach somehow kept his feet. A second later, one eye showing clear and horrible in a face half masked in gore, he was coming after Joe.

  Joe stumbled backward. With eyes and mind and hands he scrambled to locate some possible weapon made of wood. The table was too big for him to lift. He crawled beneath it, but a moment later it was knocked away. Lights went smash. In the deeper darkness, screaming and rushing seemed to go on without end. Joe, on his back, despairing of reaching useful wood, raised his pistol toward the huge form that bent toward him with hands outstretched to grab.

  A different kind of rush went past him in the air, as of a grazing blow. Something struck Poach with disembodied but elemental power, lifting him to his feet. Joe could feel the floor vibrate when the big body struck the wall.

  Automatically holstering his gun, Joe got to hands and knees and crawled toward the fireplace. Sparks were visible there, and there were streaks of luminosity in the air, screaming, fluttering gigantic shapes and shadows. One went right up the chimney with a shriek. A panic, as of whipped animals unable to break out of a pen, filled the place like fog. Joe groped his way amid crazy smashings, outcries, smells unlike anything he had encountered in his life before. What was he doing? Yes, looking for the spear. But he couldn’t find it.

  Turning away from the fireplace, he saw Kate. She was halfway across the room, trying to hold on to Morgan.

  Joe charged, in mid-stride grabbing up a wooden chair.

  He swung the chair with all his strength. It cut through empty air as Morgan’s figure disappeared.

  The chair landed on the floor, as Kate almost fell into his arms. Both of them were swaying with exhaustion. The darkened apartment was quiet now. They were alone.

  Joe gripped Kate, looked hard at her while she looked back. He started twice to try to speak.

  “We’ll talk later,” Kate said at last.

  He nodded. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Now, with a moment in which to look for it clear-headedly, he found the spear without difficulty. Kate, thinking along with him, had already picked up Morgan’s wooden knife from where it lay on the floor.

  They went out the front door of the apartment, at the bottom of a carpeted stair going down beside the elevator. Joe led the way, spear ready. It was a simple door that opened to the sidewalk—

 
; Or to where the sidewalk was supposed to be. Joe had to push the door hard to make it open, and at first the knee-deep snow that had blocked it from outside seemed to him only one more artifact of the evil nightmare from which he and Kate were trying to fight free.

  The night air was clear, the snowfall stopped at last. A keen wind was busy drifting whiteness over buried streets, impassable to cars. The old man, standing where the curb should be with his hands in his topcoat pockets, was gazing over a half-buried auto toward the other end of the street. There, almost directly under a bright streetlamp, a pair of figures waited, looking back at him. Morgan in her torn party suit, her cloud of red hair blowing free, looked tiny beside the giant man in evening dress, with the half-ruined face.

  The old man did not turn to look at Joe or Kate when they came out of the building behind him. But he said to them calmly: “They will not fly now, or change their form. My hand is on them.” He raised his voice. “Morgan, you see that my allies have not deserted me. Where are yours?”

  Whether in answer to him or not, the woman across the street tilted back her beautiful face to the invisible sky above the electric lights. Then from her throat there burst a long, keen, eerie cry. It echoed away among the dark and lifeless buildings, above the brilliant snow, and was followed by deep silence. Joe, listening, could not recall such quiet in the city at any time of day or night. Far away somewhere, diesels were laboring, doubtless either plowing snow or dragging emergency loads through it. Poach was listening too, turning his raised face this way and that. Already his fresh wound was healing. Both of Poach’s eyes were open again, and the blood that covered one side of his forehead was congealed in the frigid air.

  At last Morgan lowered her gaze again to the old man. She shrugged. “If you can gather them in, from the four winds, they will doubtless be your allies now—for as long as you seem to be winning. Much good may they do you. Cowards, one and all. Gods, is it long life itself that makes so many of us cowards?”

  Corday said: “The one who stands beside you has not yet lived a century. Yet he was cowardly enough to attack me in my earth.”

  “Oh, now we are to have considerations of honor.” Morgan shook her windblown hair. “But then with you it is always honor, is it not?” She waited a moment, then added quietly: “We are going to walk away now, Vlad. You have won.”

  The old man made no reply. Morgan looked at him a few seconds longer, then turned away and began to walk. Poach, after a last wary glance, followed. Trudging through the deep snow to the nearest street corner, Morgan looked weary as some laboring woman struggling to get home. She turned there, with difficulty heading east into the wind. Poach lurched along beside her.

  The old man took his hands out of his pockets and with each hand motioned one of his companions forward. He still had not taken his eyes off his foe. He walked ahead of Joe and Kate, keeping the distance between himself and his enemies nearly constant. The deep snow made hard walking. Joe wondered how long he and Kate were going to be able to keep up. The going was a little easier when they got to where Morgan and Poach had broken trail.

  After leading them east through untrodden drifts for half a block, Morgan stopped and turned under another streetlight. “Drive us into a corner,” she called back, “and it will be at your own peril.”

  Corday had stopped also, and once more waited with hands in topcoat pockets. “Alas,” he called back cheerfully, “to our greater peril if we do not.”

  “Yours, perhaps,” Morgan answered. “I speak now to the others. Joe? Kate? He is as cunning as the Evil One himself. Don’t you understand that if he is the survivor, he must kill you at the end? You know too much about him now, for him to let you live. Kate, he has already killed your grandmother tonight.”

  “And you?” Kate called back. “Liar. What will you do with us—refresh yourselves?”

  “You do not matter to us, fools. We only meant to frighten you—you will be left in peace forever, but only if you turn around and go home now.”

  “This is the way I’m going,” Joe told her. He took a step forward, his grip tightening on the spear.

  Morgan looked at them all again, one after another, then once more turned and walked away. Poach kept at her side, walking unsteadily. At once the old man followed them, and Joe and Kate kept pace. Presently, under a blaze of neon from the windows of an otherwise lifeless tavern, Joe noticed occasional red-brown drops spattering the snow.

  At the next cross street, Joe could see other people struggling along on foot a block and a half away—perhaps trying to get home, or to get away from home, or to find a doctor or an open liquor store. With sunrise the city, still crippled but aroused, would begin to live again and painfully try to move. Then how would the chase go?

  Morgan turned north. Holy Name Cathedral appeared ahead, slowly fell behind as they walked past it. Would there be an early Mass this morning? Involuntarily Joe glanced at Corday’s profile, then up at the stone cross. The old man’s attention was not distracted from his enemies. He did not even appear to blink.

  Suddenly the going was easy. They had come to a long stretch of sidewalk blown almost clean of snow. Joe and Kate moved up to walk closer at the old man’s sides.

  Joe said: “It goes back a long way, doesn’t it? Between you and her.”

  “It does, Joe. But all things must end.”

  “I heard Poach saying something tonight . . . that he killed Granny Clare.”

  “He did.” The old man paced on for several yards before he added: “Judy was at the house also. But she is going to be all right—if we win. Now we must concentrate on the hunt. Our enemies are still deadly dangerous. But dawn is not far off, and it will weaken them.”

  “And you too,” said Kate.

  “But not my brave allies.” Corday turned a sudden grin to left and right, including both of them. Joe wished to himself that the old man’s face hadn’t looked something like a skull when he did that. Still it had more life in it by far than many faces that were fat with flesh.

  Corday went on: “If I should be destroyed in sunlight, and they survive, still they will be weakened. And forced to remain in human form until night falls again. So if I fall, you must kill both of them today at any cost. But I have survived many such wintry northern mornings, and afternoons as well—ah, they turn east again.”

  The distant diesels, or another squadron of them, could be heard again, a trifle louder now. Among tall buildings Joe could not be sure from which direction the sound came. Nearer at hand another noise was growing rapidly; a helicopter’s rotors beat the invisible sky. Only a set of red and green running lights were visible as the machine darted past almost directly overhead.

  The streets through which Morgan led them were still empty of other people; superb lighting shone on untracked snow. Another block east, thought Joe, and they’d be on Michigan Boulevard. Joe wondered if Morgan had a goal in mind or was simply fleeing. “They’re sticking close together,” he commented.

  “As long as they do,” said the old man, “I have no wish to encounter them without your stout support. Though they are perhaps gaining a little on us now, I think they will run out of gas, as I believe the saying goes, before we do.”

  Joe tried to speed it up a little. Police officer needs assistance. It would be a busy day in Communications. All furloughs canceled. Sorry, captain, I just couldn’t make it in, there were these vampires I had to hunt . . .

  Kate appeared to be doing fine. She walked with the long wood knife swinging in her hand.

  “Corday, I said some things about you before. I’m sorry. What do your friends call you, if it’s any of my business?”

  The old man shot him a glance. “Your apology is thankfully accepted. I am comfortable with the name you know me by.”

  “Good enough.” Morgan had certainly called the old man something else, something that Joe could not now recall. Well, he certainly wasn’t going to push the question. If any reason other than gratitude were needed, he could well b
elieve that there had been a grain of truth in Morgan’s warning.

  They were now gaining slightly on the enemy.

  “You are doing excellently,” the old man complimented Joe. He turned to Kate. “And you.”

  “I feel fine,” Kate answered. “I wonder a little myself at how good I feel.”

  “This fortunate reserve of strength is doubtless a residual benefit of your recent life as a, shall we say, non-breathing human. When the life of your attacker who walks ahead of us is ended, weakness may come upon you temporarily. But then it should be about time for all of us to rest, hey?”

  “Is it certain that I’m going to—to stay—this way?”

  “It has been my experience that miracles do not reverse themselves. You will remain a breather. As long as that is what you truly want.”

  The pursuit emerged abruptly from between buildings onto Michigan Boulevard, as wide as some city blocks were long. Joe had never counted its traffic lanes, but all of them were completely buried now. Here and there cars, trucks, buses were entombed too. There was as yet no sign of snowplow resurrection. On every lamppost were festoons promoting Christmas commerce. The Boulevard was kept free by law from projecting signs of any kind, and the lines of its varied buildings stretched dreamlike to right and left, framing a cathedral aisle of clear snow.

  There came a raucous buzz from somewhere, on ground level, nearby, getting closer fast.

  Joe was first to identify the sound, and the first to react. Spear ready, he floundered out into the deep snow near the middle of the boulevard, prepared to defend his position there. He called out for help, and Kate and the old man were right behind him.

  The snowmobile snarled round a corner behind Joe, and turned speedily in his general direction. Facing Poach and Morgan with his spear leveled, he heard it pass a few yards behind him, going north. Morgan snarled at Joe, but her chance of intercepting and seizing a conveyance had been blocked. There were two people on the vehicle, and one called out something cheery on seeing folk in evening dress out for an early morning romp. The words were lost in the engine noise, and shortly the engine itself was fading in the distance.