LEGIONS OF THE DARK (VAMPIRE NATIONS CHRONICLES)

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  He hung up abruptly, got into his car, and drove as fast as he could without getting a ticket to Bette's house.

  He knocked on the door. When she didn't answer right away, he tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. He let himself in, calling to her. “Bette?"

  He found her still sleeping on the sofa in the living room. She had not moved since he'd checked on her earlier. She had not changed her work clothes. She still wore a white lab jacket over her prim white blouse and dark brown, calf-length skirt. He shook her awake. "Are you all right?"

  She blinked at him and sat up groggily. She brushed hair back from her face. "How long have I been sleeping?"

  "All evening, I think."

  She pulled at the sleeve of her lab coat. "I didn't even take this off. I must not have had dinner . . .”

  “Are you sick?"

  "No. I'm hungry." She hesitated, bringing a hand to her bosom and laying it flat between her breasts. "I don't think I'm sick. I must have been more tired than I thought."

  He sat with her at the little kitchen table while she made herself a cold cut sandwich and poured a glass of milk. "You're sure you don't want something?" she asked.

  He raised his hand, tasting the remains of a dinner that had come up again. "No, no, thank you. Bette, who was that old man who came here tonight? Was he a friend of yours?"

  "What old man?"

  Alan felt an alarm go off. "The old man. The one who came here tonight." She still looked confused. "I didn't tell you, but I was outside watching the house. I saw the old man walk down the street here to your house. You let him in. After a little while he came out again. I rushed in here to see if you were all right, and found you sleeping soundly. I left again, following him. I had to know where he was going, who he was."

  Bette shook her head as she sat at the table, turning the glass of milk around and around, watching the wet circle it made as water condensed on the outside of the glass. "I . . . I must be sick or something. I remember coming home and putting down my purse and car keys. I think I was very tired. I must have let in someone. I think I remember going to the door when there was a knock, but . . . I'm just . . . having trouble remembering what it was about."

  "Never mind. At least he didn't hurt you. Is he someone you know? You have to think, Bette. It's important."

  She raised her gaze to meet him. "I guess I know some old men. Friends of my father's from the neighborhood. There's Mr. Chang, who runs the Chinese store. And Mr. Graber, who operates a barber shop."

  "Well, this old man has a secret. You need to think about who he was."'

  "What do you mean?"

  "I followed him from your house, all the way outside of town, to another man's house. I had to walk about two miles, following him when he got out of a bus and started off. He would have seen me in my car. He went to a house way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, outside of Dallas. He met with a younger man in a huge, isolated ranch house. Anyway, when he left the house, I started to follow him again. Then I heard screams."

  "Screams? Alan, I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Screams, Bette, people screaming. There were two women in the house with the younger man, the owner of the place. I heard them screaming, so I hurried back and looked through the front windows. They were being . . . he was . . ."

  "What? What did you see?" She was leaning forward, gripping his hand on the table.

  "He bit them," Alan said, knowing how absurd it sounded, how it wasn't believable. He wouldn't have believed it either, had he not seen it with his own eyes.

  "Bit them?"

  "On the neck. He . . . tore at their necks with his teeth."

  "My God. Did you call the police?"

  "As soon as I could find a phone. But, Bette, what about the old man? He left you here, he went to a killer's house, and then he vanished, and I mean he vanished, as far as I can tell, into thin air. I was behind him and he was on the side of the road and then suddenly he wasn't."

  Bette sat back. This reminded her of the stranger who had appeared and then disappeared in her kitchen the night before. Remembering that incident made her shiver where she sat. "What did he look like?"

  "You saw him! He was here."

  "Alan. What did he look like? Was he Chinese?"

  Though puzzled, Alan complied and told her. "No, he was an old white man. He was about my height, wide in the shoulders, white hair that was kind of frazzled, like it was always windblown, deep creases on his face. He looks like he's eighty."

  "That's him," Bette whispered, bringing a hand to her lips to hide her horror.

  "Who? Graber?"

  "No. Graber's a little Black man, bow-legged, you'd know him right off. I'm talking about the man who was here last night. In my kitchen. When you knocked and scared him off. That's who you're talking about."

  Alan didn't understand. "But he was here last night, too. He knocked on the front door, and you let him in. I saw you. Why would you do that?"

  "I never would have let him in."

  "But . . ."

  "Alan, I wouldn't have let him in. He isn't real. He's some kind of . . . some kind of . . . I don't know! A spirit. A golem. A devil."

  "Do you think that's why you don't remember he was here and why you slept so long?"

  He saw she was trying to think back to discover any trace of the meeting. She shook her head finally. "I just can't remember. What did he do to me? Why can't I remember?"

  She began to cry, and Alan scooted his chair around the corner of the table and held her in his arms as she sagged against him. He didn't want to say what he thought, but he knew he had to, no matter how crazy it sounded. There was no one else he could confide in.

  "I think he's a vampire," he said, getting the worst of it out. "The other man, the killer of the two women—he was one, I know he was by the way he . . . by how he killed. And I think the old man is one, too."

  He expected Bette to refute him, to tell him he had seen too many movies, that he was imagining things and letting his judgment get twisted. He was surprised when she stopped crying, shuddered in his arms, and said, her face buried in his shirtfront, "I think you're right. That's what he must be. He's a . . . vampire. It's how he can be there one minute and then wink out. That's why he could come to my house tonight and make me forget he'd ever been here."

  "Of course, on the other hand," Alan said, hoping to dismiss his own theory, "there's no such thing as vampires. We're taking what little evidence we have and leaping to one hell of a conclusion. We have no rational explanation, so we're making one up."

  "Are we?" She drew away from him and stared into his eyes. "And the man who devours women is nothing more than a demented killer, is that it? The man who emerged from nowhere into my kitchen, then just as swiftly left it, the man who came for a visit that I can't even recall—that man's just a magician, a hypnotist. Does that make any sense either? Is it more logical? Why is one explanation more reliable than another? Because it's respectable and rational? Because that's how we've been taught to look at reality? Or could the myths that last for hundreds or thousands of years have some kind of basis in truth?"

  Alan couldn't answer her. He had been reading about vampires. Was on a mission to find one, and that could cause him to deduce he had seen them, just because he was predisposed to seeing them. His was the kind of investigation that only produced bad science and tainted evidence. But what about Bette, who understood more than he that the world wasn't always as it seemed? If she agreed with him and the evidence, no matter how it was gathered, pointed toward it, then perhaps it really was vampires.

  Except that the idea, the conclusion, was too crazy. If he accepted it, he would have to rearrange his whole notion of what life was, what being alive meant, and how the world was constructed. If the world admitted creatures who lived on blood and never died, then there might be miracles, a spirit world, a true God and a calculating Satan. There might be leprechauns, for all he knew, and water sprites, and fairies, and ogres.

/>   If the world admitted vampires into reality, there could be anything . . . and . . . everything, some of which no one had ever imagined yet. That was why science fought so hard against superstition. If a thing could not be proven by repeated experiment, then it was not a verifiable truth, but merely an odd aberration. If an apple falls from a tree once, it must always fall from any height, for gravity is dependable, it doesn't go away. There is no other explanation for gravity the way there might be other explanations for what he and Bette had seen and experienced.

  He spoke his thoughts aloud, "If it happens again and again, so that we can cross out other possibilities, we might be onto something. I'm not sure we should be saying what something is, beyond all doubt, just yet. I need to investigate more."

  "I don't think that would be a good idea, Alan."

  "Why? Because I might be hypnotized and have my own throat torn out? You've got a pretty good point. But I have other reasons to pursue this."

  "What other reasons?"

  "Didn't you wonder why I came up here to find out about the strange blood shipments you discovered?"

  "I thought you missed me." She gave him a weak smile.

  He kissed her then and said, "I did miss you. Terribly. But there's something else I haven't told you.”

  “Tell me."

  He moved his chair back. "Go ahead and eat your sandwich. This will take a while. And when I'm done, you may not like me very much anymore."

  "That could never happen." She took a napkin from beside her plate and neatly layered it over her lap. "Nothing," she said, "could make me like you any less."

  He thought about that for a moment before he began to laugh and she joined him. Nothing could make her like him less! That could be taken in two ways, one not so flattering. "I'm going to marry you one day," he blurted. "I really am."

  She smiled enigmatically and lifted half her sandwich to her lips. "I don't do Houston," she said, before biting into the bread.

  "Then maybe I'll learn to do Dallas."

  "I was afraid you'd say that."

  He drank from her milk, set the glass back into its wet ring on the tabletop, and prepared to tell her about Charles Upton and the strange covenant they'd made.

  Outside, in the dark rectangle of window over the stove, neither Alan nor Bette noticed a figure pressing its face against the pane of glass. The face stared at them unblinkingly. No telling breath fogged the window, for no aspiration was taking place in the being's lungs. There was no heartbeat ticking in the chest of the beast that watched and listened just beyond the thin barrier, glaring at the couple.

  ~*~

  Ross sensed the advance of strangers coming to interrupt him long before he heard the sirens and the crunch of tires over his gravel drive. They were miles away, but they were coming, he knew that for certain.

  Immediately he was reminded of the presence he'd felt near his house. It was when Mentor was leaving. Mentor had told him no one was there. And he had been too dazzled by the thought of taking the two women waiting on the sofa to sharpen his senses and discover the intruder.

  Now, he was furious, both at Mentor and whoever had been outside his home. A stranger, a human must have seen something. He must have called the police.

  Ross moved swiftly to the two dead women, lifting both bodies onto his shoulders, and he strode through the house to the back, pushing open the door with his mind. He rushed into the night with his burdens. He took them acres behind the house, dropping them like the garbage they were. They rolled over scaly dry ground into a natural gully. Coyotes and other wild predators would take care of the rest.

  He was back into the living room of his home in seconds, cleaning blood from the Spanish tile floors. He finished the job quickly, licking at the pools and splatters the way a cat laps at a dish of milk. He took the stained ottoman and stuffed it into a closet in a bedroom at the rear of the house. He could dispose of it later. Back in the living room, he surveyed his work and found it good. Without using every available forensic tool, the police would never suspect there had been a slaughter.

  He met the solitary policeman at the door, let him in, offered him coffee, asked what he was doing this far from the city. While Ross was talking, he tapped the deputy's mind and plucked from it every shred of suspicion.

  Once the county sheriff's car had left, Ross, still furious at the intrusion and the accusation he'd found in the policeman's mind, went out the front door and walked all around his home. He found a man's scent near the windows. It was very distinct, filled with fear and loathing. It was strongest behind the stand of cypress at the corner of the house. Checking further, following the scent, he found evidence of human effluence.

  Ross howled, opening his mouth wide and baying as a wolf does at the moon.

  He would trace this scent if it took him the rest of the night. He would follow it to its home and find the man who had dared come onto his property, leer through the windows, and then call in the authorities after he'd evidently seen the two women die.

  And now here he was, pressed against the little foreign woman's window, watching them. She was Bette Kinyo, the woman interfering in his blood bank operations. The man was her lover, a doctor named Alan.

  His lips pulled back from his teeth in an automatic gesture of threat, but he swallowed the growl threatening to erupt. He had come merely to find the unwise human who had invaded his private space and dared to report his activities. He would decide when and how to take him later. First, he wanted to know what the man knew. He wanted to see how much he would tell the woman.

  He really wanted to play with both of them. Watch and intrude the way he had been intruded upon. Learn their secrets and in the end display his intimate knowledge of their lives before he dispatched them to the Devil. Nothing, at the moment, could give him greater pleasure.

  He sank back from the glass, vaporizing into the molecules of a thin fog, and insinuated himself beneath the tiny crevice at the bottom of the kitchen door.

  Once inside, he wafted into a corner near the humming refrigerator, curling around its side until he was behind it. From there he listened, and what he heard increased his fury until his molecules danced like starbursts of electrical energy giving off cold heat and light.

  How he hated humans. He could not remember what it had been like to be one. Sometimes he convinced himself that he had never been one, but was always Predator, always since the beginning of time.

  He settled down again, resting at the base of the wall behind the black coils of the refrigerator's condensing unit.

  He heard the man talking about a billionaire in Houston who was dying of a disease and wanted to find a way to beat it and beat death at the same time. That kind did not deserve eternal life. The diseased. The old and weak. The greedy and impure. They should die and do the world a favor.

  The humming of the machine so close to him lulled him a little and the edge of his anger subsided to mere disgruntlement. He listened to the couple's idle talk about searching for vampires and the making of a research center and the possibility of life after death. Part of Ross' attention wandered to the window over the store. He sensed something approaching there and began to concentrate so that he might discover what or who it was.

  His fury returned when he realized it was another vampire. It was another Predator, in fact. He could sense the being's frightful power. He was out there, infringing on territory already inhabited by Ross.

  The creature was a Predator, but had not supped in days. He was hungry, but he was not coming to kill and feed. He wasn't looking for would-be victims in the foreign woman's house.

  It was a hungry Predator who had stopped preying. Only one of them was fool enough to do that. Mentor. Always where he wasn't supposed to be. Always judgmental and grating on the nerves. And now he was calling to Ross, requesting he leave his hiding place and come outside.

  So you want to pow-wow, thought Ross. You track me down and get in my way all the time, you ass.

  Ross did n
ot want to leave his cozy little spot behind the machine where the humming vibrations soothed him, where the darkness and privacy were so appealing. He had more to learn about the humans' plans. He had wanted just a taste of the woman with the short, shiny hair and moist, slanted, beautiful eyes.

  Trust Mentor to throw his designs into chaos.

  He would have to come out, leave the house, find out why he was being summoned. He would relish telling Mentor that even though he might have cleared the woman's mind about Strand-Catel's blood shipments, the man who called himself Alan was right there to remind her and to give back her memories. He should have wiped both their minds to insure they'd leave the blood bank alone. How would Mentor like failing for a change? How would he like knowing he was not infallible and that he could not control humans nearly as well as he thought?

  The couple rose from the table and exited the kitchen. Ross spread out along the floor, sliding from beneath the refrigerator, and out again on the side nearest the back door where he flowed at the couple's heels. His fog-self curled and edged over the threshold into a hall where they had disappeared. He rose up in the shape of a head with eyes that sought after them. Then the fog folded onto itself and slid underneath the door like a regretful lover. In a second he was himself again, housed in flesh, and scowling fiercely at Mentor.

  "Who asked you to come here? I thought I was through with you for the night."

  "They're harmless," Mentor said, ignoring Ross's rude sarcasm.

  "The man saw me take the two women. He was the presence I asked you about at my house. You lied to me, and I took your word for it. Not very trustworthy, are you?"

  Mentor looked surprised at the news. He hesitated a moment before saying, "I can make him forget he was there and that he saw anything."

  "The way you made the woman forget? She brought up the memories again when the man reminded her."