Buffy the Vampire Slayer 3

by Nancy Holder

  For a second, Cordelia’s eyes finally focused on Buffy, and she was surprised to see a flash of relief in them. She knew that she and Cordy were never going to be BFF, but there was something gratifying in knowing that her mere presence could calm Cordelia down.

  “Oh, Buffy,” she said, dazed. “Spiders …”

  But as the words trailed off, Cordelia abruptly lost consciousness and fell to the floor.

  Okay, this is ridiculous, Buffy decided.

  She was tempted to pick her up and carry her to her next stop, the library, but quickly decided that, in this case, it wouldn’t do Cordelia any permanent damage to stay where she was until Buffy figured out what was going on and how to kill it.

  Moments later she rushed into the library, calling out, “Giles!” but the only response came from Willow, who was seated at the main table surrounded by stacks of books four feet high in every direction.

  “Buffy … finally,” Willow said weakly.

  Concern trumped curiosity at the sight of her friend, bleary eyed and struggling to remain conscious.

  Buffy hurried to the table, grabbed Willow by the shoulders, and examined her condition. Her breath was shallow and ragged. She was paler than usual, and she struggled with every blink to keep her dry and bloodshot eyes open.

  “Willow, what is it?” Buffy demanded.

  “Can’t fall asleep … ,” Willow said.

  “Okay,” Buffy said in her most reasonable voice. “Why not?”

  “Won’t wake up,” Willow said, pushing Buffy aside and, staggering behind the library counter, downed a few gulps of the remains of what had to be at least a day-old cup of coffee.

  The good news was this seemed to fortify her a bit, for the moment. Buffy could only pray that the coffee in question had at least once belonged to Giles, because anything else was too yick to contemplate.

  “I think I figured it out,” Willow said more firmly as she rejoined Buffy at the table.

  “You have my undivided attention,” Buffy replied.

  “It’s a spell,” Willow began. “And it’s caused by a demon.”

  “This, I can work with,” Buffy replied. “Just point me in the right direction and I’ll kill the rest.”

  “The sleep deprivation is only the first part,” Willow said. “None of us has really slept in days.”

  “Right.” Buffy nodded. “I’ve already seen the trailer to this movie.”

  “Instead, we’re experiencing what’s called ‘the sleep of living death.’”

  “Wait a minute,” Buffy said. “Where have I heard of that before?”

  “It’s like a trance,” Willow continued. “Everyone affected loses consciousness, like when you sleep, but you’re not really sleeping.”

  “So the demon in question is putting everyone in a trance so it can swoop down and, what? Eat our brains? Steal our socks? What does the demon want?” Buffy asked.

  “I don’t think it’s meant for everyone,” Willow said, pulling out one of her reference books and handing it to Buffy. “I found this legend about a town in France that fell asleep for a hundred years.”

  “The Ice Capades!” Buffy said with enthusiasm.

  “Huh?” Willow had to ask.

  “They did a really cool version of ‘Sleeping Beauty on Ice’ a few years ago. My dad and I went.”

  “Huh?” Willow repeated.

  “That’s the story where I heard about the sleep of living death thingy. Doesn’t the spell put the whole kingdom to sleep for, like, a hundred years?”

  “Buffy!” Willow said as sharply as she could through the grogginess.

  “Right, sorry,” Buffy said, chagrined. “Focusing now.”

  “This story predates any of the known sources for ‘Sleeping Beauty’ or any other fairy tale by hundreds of years. In fact, it’s very likely that this story might have been the inspiration for the tale that was eventually made famous by the Brothers Grimm. I’ve always thought their stories, though well told, were incredibly derivative, and just because they got all the credit—”

  “Um, Willow?” Buffy interrupted. “Stay on target.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Willow said, shaking her head to clear it. “The legend is about a farmer who angered a demon.”

  “How?” Buffy asked.

  “He had pledged his best cow in return for a good yield on his crops, and when the time came, he never paid up.”

  “It’s almost hard to believe no one ever made an animated film about that one,” Buffy said.

  “So the demon cast a spell over the whole town, only it wasn’t about the villagers. It was designed to put the farmer into a highly suggestive trance-state so that each night, the demon could draw the farmer into his dimension, where he was tortured mercilessly until sunrise.”

  “Wait, let me guess,” Buffy interjected. “He brought the farmer to his dimension through a gateway?”

  “Yes.” Willow nodded. “This happened night after night, for more than a week. The farmer didn’t have any memory of what happened to him in the demon dimension. The problem was what happened to the rest of the town. The first part, we already know: People got agitated, then really cranky, and eventually they started trying to sleep at inappropriate times of the day because their bodies were literally shutting down. If you try to go long enough without sleep, eventually your body will make you sleep, or worse.”

  “So where’s the ‘worse’?” Buffy asked. “I thought sleep is what we all need right now.”

  “Yeah, but the villagers who fell asleep while under the spell didn’t just sleep. They fell into the sleep of living death, from which no one could wake them,” Willow replied.

  “Until when?” Buffy asked.

  “Until forever,” Willow said.

  “Okay,” Buffy said thoughtfully, “so what about the prince and the dragon and the happily ever after part of the story?”

  Even exhausted Willow had the presence of mind to roll her eyes at this one. “Buffy, how many times do we have to talk about fairy tales and propaganda?” she asked pointedly.

  “Okay, so if you’re right, the farmer in our scenario is Principal Snyder. I get some of his blood, I use it to go through the gateway. I find the demon and I kill it. That will stop the spell, right?” Buffy asked.

  “No, the gateway is actually the key,” Willow replied. “The spell emanates from the demon dimension that is linked to ours via the gateway.…” She trailed off.

  It was clear that, despite the restorative powers of day-old caffeine, Willow was once again starting to fade.

  “Willow?” Buffy said with genuine concern.

  “Sorry. As long as the gateway exists, the spell will still bleed out into Sunnydale. It will remain open until that which was stolen is returned,” Willow continued, reading a passage from her text as she pointed it out to Buffy.

  “You lost me,” Buffy said. “What was stolen?”

  “I don’t know,” Willow said, frustrated. “In the legend, the demon stole something of the farmer’s and used it to open the gateway in the first place. The only way to break the spell is to close the gateway, and the only way to do that is to find what the demon took from Snyder and bring it back with you.”

  Suddenly Buffy remembered the small dust-free patch on the dresser she’d found in the house.

  “I think I might know what we’re looking for,” Buffy said. “Or at least its shape and size. I have to go back to the house. How long before everyone falls into this sleeping-death thing?” she asked.

  “It depends,” Willow replied. “If you were pretty well rested before it started, that would buy you some time. But …”

  “From the looks of things around here, time has already started to run out,” Buffy finished for her. “Have you discussed any of this with Giles?” was her next question.

  Willow shook her head. “I haven’t seen him this morning. I came in pretty early, once I found the legend at home. I wanted to cross-check it with the other sources … ,” she said, strugglin
g to keep her eyes open.

  Buffy quickly scanned the library for any sign of Giles. The door to his office was locked, but that wasn’t unusual when he wasn’t present. Opting for the most efficient solution, she turned the knob hard, breaking the lock, and pushed open the door, where she was immediately met with the sight of Giles, collapsed on the office floor, holding a crossbow at his chest pointed directly at the door.

  Buffy knelt beside him and deftly extricated his fingers from the crossbow, then shook Giles a few times in a vain effort to wake him. Even after a good sharp slap across the face, for which she was sure he would forgive her—he’s certainly endured worse during our many training sessions—Giles could not be roused. Now more frightened than anything, Buffy returned to the main table, where Willow sat dazed but still fighting to stay awake.

  “Willow,” Buffy said sharply, “I don’t care what you have to do, you keep those peepers open.”

  “I’m trying,” she said weakly, her head drooping forward.

  “Willow!” Buffy said more firmly.

  Willow’s head snapped up, but at that moment their attention was drawn to the library door, which was thrown open by an incoherent, pajama-clad Xander.

  “She’s after me! Stop her!” he cried out in alarm, rushing to Buffy and cowering behind her.

  Buffy immediately moved to check the door, but the hallway outside the library remained deserted. When she turned back, Xander had hidden himself under the table and seemed to be trying to barricade himself in with stacks of books, fortified by chairs.

  “Xander!” Buffy demanded. “Stop with the building blocks and tell me what happened.”

  “All I did was grab a piece of toast,” Xander insisted, the fear in his voice rising to a fever pitch. “It’s toast. Not a federal crime. Why would she make the toast if she didn’t want me to eat it?”

  Buffy exchanged a worried glance with Willow, who seemed to have perked up a bit at Xander’s entrance.

  “Xander, I don’t understand,” Buffy said, her exasperation rising.

  “I grabbed the toast, and suddenly she was going after my fingers with the butcher knife,” Xander replied with what would have been an appropriate amount of terror in a five-year-old girl.

  “Who?” Buffy asked.

  “Mommy!” Xander shouted. He paused, searching his memory for a moment, then added, “At least, it was my mommy at first.”

  “Xander, I don’t understand,” Buffy said, beginning to pull some of the books away from the barricade to get closer to her friend and hopefully calm him a bit.

  “It was Mom, and then it wasn’t,” he said, as if he were just as confused as Buffy. “It was my mom, and then it was a pig. A little pig. A pig that spoke English. It was angry with me because it said I had eaten it, but I never ate a pig. Well, there was that one time, but that wasn’t really me, was it? Buffy, you have to kill that pig!”

  Buffy turned to Willow, who was shaking her head.

  “He’s delirious,” she said, answering Buffy’s unspoken question. “He’s hallucinating, taking stuff from his subconscious and confusing it with reality. It comes with the no sleeping.”

  “With a side of paranoia, I’m assuming,” Buffy added.

  Buffy didn’t need a psychology course to understand the symbolism. A year earlier, Xander had briefly been possessed by a hyena demon, along with a pack of other students, and one of their most disgusting acts had been eating Sunnydale High’s first and only living mascot alive.

  Then she remembered Cordelia and the bathroom and the imaginary spiders. She also remembered how quickly Cordelia had collapsed after doing battle with her spiders.

  “Xander,” Buffy said in her most conciliatory tone, “don’t worry about the pig. The pig can’t get you here. You’re safe.”

  Unfortunately, Xander had already lost consciousness behind the walls of his makeshift fort.

  “Xander, wake up!” Buffy shouted.

  He didn’t respond. Like Giles, he was now one of the sleeping dead.

  Buffy’s heart started to race. Most of the really scary stuff she did as the Slayer she did alone, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t both fortified and secured by the presence of her friends and their constant support. One by one, she was losing those she held most dear. Part of her demanded that she suck it up and get moving, while another part, the part that was still grieving the loss of Angel, demanded that she give in to her own fear and curl up in a tiny ball next to Xander until the danger had passed.

  The problem was, the danger would never pass if she didn’t pull herself together and go out and kick the danger’s ass.

  Forcing her fear and abandonment issues aside, she turned again to Willow, who was still seated at the table, but with her head tipped back and snoring softly.

  Oh, and I was so close to not panicking, Buffy thought.

  This ends now, she decided. She knew she would ultimately accept the loss of her first love. But strong as she was, she didn’t think there would ever be a time or place when she could also resign herself to the loss of Willow, Xander, or Giles.

  It was time to do what she did best.

  It was time to be the Slayer.

  CHAPTER NINE

  First things first, Buffy thought as she squared her shoulders and walked briskly toward the library doors.

  I need to find Snyder.

  Buffy had no doubt he was the target of the demon, as he was the only person who seemed to be able to enter the gateway at will. She tried to imagine what in the world the demon would have stolen to draw him there. The legend didn’t seem to indicate that it needed to be anything particularly meaningful to the victim, but Buffy firmly believed that whatever had once rested alone on the top of the chest of drawers in that little boy’s bedroom had been a most prized possession. Given its size, it could have been a packet of Chiclets, or maybe more like a Rubik’s Cube. Of course, they didn’t have Rubik’s Cubes a hundred years ago, or whenever it was that the principal had actually been a child. That fad had only started a few years before Buffy’s birth, never mind the fact that Buffy seriously doubted that Snyder would ever have been able to solve the thing on his own.

  Whatever it was would be found in the demon dimension on the other side of the gateway. She’d never actually been to a demon dimension, but in her imagination, anything brought over from her world would probably clash with the fires and chains and severed body parts and would hopefully be pretty easy to spot.

  Buffy wanted to find Snyder immediately and force him through the gateway. The sooner the spell was broken, the sooner things would return to the abnormal state she had come to think of fondly as normal. She started with his office. Though most of the school was deserted, she allowed herself a fleeting hope that something might go her way and she’d find him there, but no luck. The office was empty.

  Though she usually preferred to leave the Nancy Drew–ing to Giles and Willow, she did spend a few minutes looking around. She’d always hated this office, mainly because every time she’d ever been there, she’d been on the receiving end of Snyder’s witless ranting. She wasn’t surprised at all to find that her file was on top of his desk in a wire basket he’d marked “Beyond Hope,” along with the files of several other students Buffy only knew by reputation as destined to spend the better part of their adult lives as guests of the state’s penal institutions. She wasn’t sure if the red and silver star stickers that Snyder had placed on her file next to her name were a good sign, but she seriously doubted it.

  His desk was filled with your basic office supplies, though they were meticulously organized. It was in the rear of one of the lower file drawers where she found something that definitely gave her pause. Tossed behind a series of file folders were several days’ worth of white bandages soaked generously with dried blood.

  Oh, yuck.

  Buffy didn’t know if the blood she was going to need to go through the gateway had to be fresh, but just in case, she tucked a snippet of bandages into her pocket
and immediately refused to think further about how thoroughly disgusting it was to have them anywhere near her.

  The only other interesting discovery was a heavy stain on the carpet beneath Snyder’s desk. A guy who arranged the pencils in his drawer by sharpness and length wasn’t one to tolerate an obvious stain. Buffy had seen enough blood, dried and otherwise, to guess pretty quickly that here was more Snyder blood. The important thing to note was that it was fairly recent.

  Obviously whatever games the demon is playing with Snyder each night must include some serious pain for him to be bleeding all over the carpet each day, Buffy thought without too much concern for the principal.

  Buffy wished she had made note of the condo Snyder owned that Willow had identified as his permanent residence. Odds were, he was probably collapsed there, like most of the rest of Sunnydale by now. But given the demon’s interest in him, Buffy doubted that this would be enough to stop him from keeping his evening date with the gateway.

  With hours before he would make his appearance in Arborville, Buffy decided that between now and then she would do well to stock up on a few supplies from her weapons locker at home. Only now did it dawn on her that nothing Willow had told her gave her any clue about the demon she would be facing soon enough or how best to kill it.

  I’ll probably just use whatever’s handy, she decided, wondering for the first time what demonic torture devices would look like. She had just started training with a really cool mace, a long silver shaft with a head of pointed spikes, and decided that that, plus several stakes and a small ax, would be the best accessories to complete her ensemble for the evening. She hurried back to collect the mace from Giles’s personal weapons storage cage and then turned her steps toward Ravello Drive, where she’d find the rest of her things.

  Walking the streets of Sunnydale midmorning, Buffy found her spirits sinking as she got a visceral feel for the impact of the sleep spell. Every business she passed was either empty or closed. The only cars she saw were parked, and a few contained drivers who might have tried to set off for work that morning but had finally succumbed to exhaustion and were now passed out in their seats. There was no traffic, not even the faint roar of engines a few streets away. It was the feeling Buffy usually associated with walking these same streets in the middle of the night, but the bright sunlight was jarring and dissonant.