Mindy hit the ladder, pulled herself up, legs kicking in the water, trying to step on rungs that weren’t yet there. In the blink of an eye her fingers were wrapped around the top of the cold metal, her foot was stepping on the first rung. A shooting pain went through her other foot; she pulled it from the water and saw two neat holes, like little dabs of black paint, before the blood came. It crept around her wet foot and the dewy little hairs were like a spider-web being built. But she was out of the water. At least she was out of the water…
She saw the boat’s name on a bulkhead as soon as she swung herself up. The Persephone. Mindy stepped down on the boat’s floor—what was the nautical term for that? Floor. Deck? Floor. Her mind was still racing, still in the water. She had to focus. Think. She looked down and lifted her leg to leave a bloody footprint on the floor. She was bleeding. She watched the blood trickle from her leg, overflowing the lines of her footprint, becoming a tiny puddle. Okay. She needed to find a bandage. Okay.
She put her foot down—it didn’t hurt yet—was that bad? One foot in front of the other, other foot in front of the first. She was limping; her leg seemed uncooperative, like it had fallen asleep up to the thigh. But it didn’t hurt. She thought: this must be bad.
“Hello!” she called into the dark ship. The cabin doors open and dark, she thought of a giant skull leering at her. It was a big vessel, over a hundred feet long, which seemed like the kind of thing that would cost a lot of money. They had to have first aid kits aboard, right? Or at least towels. She had to put pressure on the wound. She could either go up into the tower, or she could go inside and down to the middle deck. She didn’t want to be climbing in her condition. Down it was.
Going down the stairs, she fought both the urge to hurry and the urge to be cautious. She had to be quick, but a tumble down the stairs, a broken bone, those would not make her night better. She called out; the sound of her own voice was reassuring, no matter how hoarse and shaky.
“Hello? Anyone here? I was in the water and something bit me—I don’t mean to bother you—I just need some help. Sir?” Anyone who owned a yacht seemed like a “sir” to her. “Please? Anyone?”
The emptiness ate her words like it was ravenous. She reached the bottom of the stairs. This main room was a big bowl surrounding a glass floor; there were lights to illuminate the view under the boat. They fired blue light up into the cabin, making things just visible with a dim glow. Mindy could just about see her hands in front of her face.
The interior was packed with furniture, bookshelves, wine cabinets, not freestanding but set into concentric rings leading down to the glass bottom so they formed a series of rings with passages cutting through them: one from Mindy’s entrance to the glass bottom, another to the front of the ship, two more to the sides. She was reminded of a Roman coliseum and imagined a shark eating a seal under the arena of glass, like a Christian being fed to the lions.
Then she saw it. A white towel lay in the middle of the glass floor. How had she missed it, God was she stupid. Someone had dropped it there. Mindy limped onto the glass, stamping it with bloody footprints, and sank to her knees beside the towel. She wrapped it around her foot, pulled it tight. Now pain flooded her foot, and the towel turned red. She looked down into the spotlight the Persephone cast to the lakebed and saw something sleek and dark shoot past. Something sleek and dark and red, not all over, just in one spot, a red eye staring up at her. Seeing her. It was headed for the back of the boat. Mindy thought of the blood she’d left on the ladder—dripping down into the water. Tempting it.
It couldn’t get her. It couldn’t get her. She was out of the water, her bleeding had stopped, and she was safe. She just had to find a phone, or a person, and get help. Tell them that something was in Lake Travis. Mindy tried to think shark, barracuda, crocodile, but her mind refused to call it by one of those names. Sharks and barracudas and crocodiles were animals. They weren’t evil.
She stood and immediately lost her balance, smacking her head on the glass floor. The yacht had lurched to the side; no, it had lurched backward. As if something very heavy were at the aft end of the ship. Pulling itself onboard.
No. No, no, no. Mindy said it aloud. “No.” The word was simple and stupid and useless. Think. She should probably get off the glass. It was still in the water. It had to be still in the water. And if it was in the water, could it get through the glass? Sink the boat? Mindy wouldn’t let it get her. She would lock herself in a cabin, stay there and drown before she’d let that thing do what it had looked at her and thought of doing.
It was on the boat. She heard the stairs creaking. They hadn’t creaked underneath her weight.
“No. No, please.”
The noise stopped, but a tiny reptile part of Mindy’s mind felt the threat still oncoming, saw movement through closed eyelids. Mindy resented this low, primordial intrusion into her civilized brain. It felt like she was thinking someone else’s thoughts—someone scared and small, someone she wasn’t.
The footsteps had stopped, but now she saw a broth of mist pouring down the steps, thick, white, almost liquid in its consistency. It pooled onto the deck like swathes of silk and then, as if it had a mind of its own, oozed to the left. It seemed caught in a gust of wind, a river current, but there was no wind, no water. It just…slunk behind a bookshelf.
Then the rats spilled out. Swarms of them. A hundred sets of beady red eyes, glowing as if the darkness had been stabbed over and over again until something worse could bleed through. The rats squeaked and squealed, moving with one horrible instinct, pushing over and around each other and down a set of steps so they were closer to her, louder, the red eyes brighter. They kept going, slipping from view behind a white leather luxury couch. And then came the wolf—big, huge, six feet long. Growling in the dark, its red eyes flashing, the only thing Mindy could really see besides the bristles of its mane catching the light. It couldn’t be there, it was impossible, but its nails clicked on the shining floor tiles like the snapping strands of a rope, snip-snip-snip, until the rope broke and whatever was holding it dropped away. It growled, the sound filling the cabin, echoing as the creature dissolved, bleeding into shadows.
“Please go away.” Mindy thought she said. There didn’t seem to be a difference anymore: whatever fears she imagined, whatever horrible fate she could picture, it was as real as anything her eyes could report to her. Please go away, please go away, please go away. Stuck in her head like a song.
I need to wake up. The thought dropped into her head like a rope ladder into a snake pit. A way out. She was asleep, dreaming. She just had to make it stop, force it out of her head, out of her subconscious. I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten. I don’t have to keep my eyes open, because it can’t hurt me, it’s just a dream.
Mindy closed her eyes. She stopped, turning to face the creature as it flowed from one form to the next, her nightmare spooling out. She still heard it circling her. A wafting noise—a strong exhale of wind like, like… It wasn’t important. It was a dream. She just had to count. One. Two. Three. It was behind her now, but it wasn’t real, was not really there. Four. Five. She couldn’t hear it anymore. Did that mean this was working? Six. Seven. Was it still there? Eight. Nine. What was that noise? That little anonymous noise, that bit of rasping that could’ve been a million things on any other night but for tonight, when it was that.
Ten.
“Ten.” She could open her eyes. It wouldn’t be there anymore because this was her dream. She forced her eyes to open. She looked to her left. She looked to her right. Then, all at once, she spun around. It was not behind her either. There was nothing there. Nothing anywhere.
Just a dream. The drugs. This is what McGruff the Crime Dog warned you about in elementary school, remember?
She was alone. She was awake. She was sober. She was still on a glass bottomed super yacht. Her foot still hurt, but she had probably just cut it on a rock. She had to stay with the hurt, not with the fear. Pain was real, pain was usefu
l, pain told her what was wrong. Fear just made up what might be wrong. A phone. She had to find a phone, call 911, then she could stop. Then she could sleep and have all the nightmares she wanted.
The voice came from above her. “Unclean.”
It was a cold voice, slicing into her hearing like ice. She was half-asleep, she told herself, a waking dream, a bit of the pill still dissolving in her system. But she looked up. She saw the bat.
Oh God, the bat. Clinging to the ceiling, its black mass distorting in the liquefying underwater pattern from below. It was huge, the size of a man, the size of the night, so big it was like a part of her; no, she was a part of it, an extension of its body that had fallen numb and now was being woken up. She stared into red eyes and felt herself slip under.
A dream. All just a dream. It’s a dream.
The bat opened its mouth, jaws gleaming white with slobber, and for a second she thought it would say her name. She thought it calmly, rationally; it made as much sense as anything else did. But its lips hadn’t drawn back to speak. They were revealing a set of teeth that were human, men’s teeth in an animal mouth, all except for the eyeteeth. The canines. They were elongated, spearing out from the jaw like a saber-toothed tigers fangs. And beyond those stark white teeth, nothing but darkness. The thing’s maw was as black as a tomb.
It came for her, or grew larger, or let the world slip away while it remained, solid and real. But as it fell, it was suddenly not made of itself, it was a thousand million insects, everything that crept or crawled, and they hit Mindy like a heavy blanket. She heard a subwoofer-bass hum in her ears as wings beat around her, felt every tiny leg clinging on her body, saw them, heard them, and was them as they swarmed around her, an impenetrable cloud of locusts wrapping her up. She closed her eyes and shut her mouth and covered her ears, but already she heard that voice in her head and thought it was one of them, in her ear, in her skull, whispering to her. Unclean, unclean.
The awful warmth of their bacchanalia ended as abruptly as stepping out of a sunny day and into cool air-conditioning. It wasn’t bugs anymore. It was a man. She felt him pressed to her from behind, his arms around her in a lover’s embrace, as close as Lucia had held her. Except that Lucia always gave her room to breathe, let her slip away when she’d had enough affection. The man didn’t. His arms crushed her to his body, cold and stiff. She was far away and thought she could keep going, into another dream, and leave her body to the bat and its nightmare.
But no. She thought of her shopping trip with Lucia and the cute underwear they’d bought together and she didn’t want anything to happen to it. She dug her fingernails into his arm. It gave a little, even if she didn’t break the skin. Not so much steel as Kevlar. He lifted her off her feet—tall, he was so tall—but she could still kick at his legs, hit his shins. It had to hurt him. It had to do something.
He was going shush, shush, like a father soothing an uncooperative child, and she found herself thinking, Fuck you, Jack, I’m not unclean. I showered right before I went to work. She threw her head back, felt a protrusion notch into her skull. His nose. She hadn’t broken it, but she still heard a sigh of pain come from him, the exhale of it cutting the back of her neck. His grip tightened. The air shot out of her lungs; she felt it rattle out of her throat.
She screamed, not in words but in thoughts: Helppleasehelpmeidontwanttodie. It came out as a word, long and pleading, and he brought his hand up to cover her mouth. She moved first. She bit down on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. His skin was so hard, it scraped her teeth, but she dug in. She would bite him down to the bone like a rattler. He could cut her head off, and she would still be biting him. He’d have to carry her head right the fuck around with him.
Another piercing exhale to the back of her neck and he tried to pull his hand away; she clung to it. Her teeth hurt like she was eating steak. You kill me, I’m dying with a chunk of your hand in my mouth. She thought of detectives in smart suits running DNA tests on his chunk of hand lodged in her throat; a coroner saying what a brave girl she was. Don’t worry, Mindy, we got the guy.
He pulled. She bit. The skin gave and his blood flooded her mouth. It wasn’t warm, it wasn’t salty. It was cold and thick, knotted like old cough syrup. She wouldn’t release her hold on him to spit it out. She swallowed and felt it all the way down her esophagus, cold and heavy. It sat in the pit of her stomach like she’d eaten dry ice.
His arm relaxed around her. She’d done it. The pain had been too much. He was in shock, he was losing consciousness. Another second and she’d break free. She would run and she would swim and she would not stop until she was in her car. She would drive to the police station and park in the fucking lobby.
He let go of her, and her legs were already pedaling, scraping the floor for a foothold. The long fingernail of a long finger touched her neck and broke her skin and curled around her carotid artery and dug it right out of her flesh, like an earthworm out of wet soil. She felt the tissue of it hit the outside of her neck, a warm strand of spaghetti, and then the blood came. Hot and fast, spraying like a garden hose. It was down her neck and her underarm and her side, soaking her shirt. A few seconds and it was in her pants, her cute underwear. Her pumping feet caught the ground and she took a few steps before she slipped on her own blood. She was running on air anyway.
Her skull smacked the glass with an impact that felt faint, even to her. It was enough to put a hairline crack in the glass-bottomed hull, like a single perfect tear, but it didn’t let a drop of water in. Her blood filled the little fissure quickly. She saw her blood spreading out under her, like a warm blanket for her to sleep on. Her prey-instinct was silent now, given up. Her stomach hurt, but nothing else did.
And she felt him over her, his body as chilled as the first day of winter. She could see his face if only she could move her head, but she was too comfortable for that. Blood made a fine pillow. She did see his hand come down: alabaster white, blue veins like cracks in marble. The pad of his finger touched her blood, and it stopped spreading. It went up his finger like soda up a straw. She saw the pale skin darken, the blue vein redden, and the shriveled flesh grew until the long fingernails fit inside his fingers in a fine manicure.
When people died, their bodies shrank over time, but their hair and fingernails stayed the same. Made it look like they were still growing. Her mind vomited up the thought.
It seemed to take a while for her blood to be vacuumed up by that one outstretched finger. But finally it was all gone except for a few molecules of red tint on the glass. He brought his hand to her head, touched her hair. It wasn’t a fond gesture; he was just wiping off the last of her blood.
With all her strength, Mindy turned away. Moved her head one half-inch so not a single speck of him was in her sight. She didn’t want him to be a part of her last moments on Earth. She didn’t want him in Heaven with her, even in memory. She looked down and saw her face in the red glass and the waters of Lake Travis. Only it wasn’t her face.
It was Lucia’s.
CHAPTER 8
Mindy never got the expression “woke in a cold sweat” before. She lived in Texas. She woke up feeling she was frying in her skin, her sweat boiling on her like grease on a hot skillet. Her sheets and mattress were soaked with it; they stuck to her like flypaper. A discarded mask of sweat lay on her pillow, lovingly revealed by the moonlight.
She felt grimy and disgusted with herself. She peeled herself out of bed and went straight to the bathroom with no concern for modesty. She turned on the shower as cold as it could go and put herself under the pure, clean spray. Her boxers and Grandma-gift T-shirt became wet straitjackets around her. She stripped them off and let the water rinse off every bit of the dream, wash it out of her hair. She swallowed some to salve her dry throat. It almost hit the spot.
She turned the water off without bothering to shampoo or soap, just swabbed her purified body with a towel. It’d taken her a minute under the frozen spray to remember herself, but she finall
y had. She hadn’t gone back into the water at Lake Travis. She’d gotten out, she’d left Lucia behind, and she’d gone home. Anything else was just a dream.
She thought of herself…or was it Lucia…in the dream. It hadn’t felt like a dream. It was like it hadn’t wanted to be a dream. With her towel wrapped around her, white and clean and soft, she found she worried about Lucia. Trying to picture her put thoughts of cement blocks and plastic wrappings in Mindy’s head. Back in her room, she looked through her window to Lucia’s. Her room was dark and empty. Mindy thought of crime scenes. She found her phone and dialed Lucia’s number before her self-consciousness could prevent her. Three a.m. Great time for some girl talk.
“Hey, this is Lucia. Guess you finally worked up the balls to ask me out, huh? Probably on a date with one of my other boyfriends right now; make your pitch at the beep.”
“Hey, Lucia, hey.” Mindy was talking even before the beep sounded.
“Hey,” she repeated when she realized the recording had finally started. “I just wanted to hear your voice, and I guess now I have. Well, sorta. I got your answering machine. Very funny, by the way. Crazy how I hadn’t heard your message until…now. Uh, listen—” Mindy swore to herself she would not “uh” or “um” again. She would say what she meant until she was done. “I know we had—have our differences, but I just wanted to tell you that I really care about you. And I don’t know how many people care about you. Maybe you’re some poor little rich girl who doesn’t have any real friends, maybe that’s just a stupid cliché. But you’ve got at least one, okay? You’ve got me. Bye.”
Mindy hung up. She dressed. She went downstairs to find something to eat. She tried to distract herself within the funhouse of her own mind, make her thoughts walk the familiar paths, the proper paths…come to the same half-dozen justifications as always. She could have something fattening, but she would skip breakfast, skip lunch, skip dessert, take the dog for a walk in the morning, do something, do anything.
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 10