by Nancy Holder
The man nodded and raised the disk. “Please, don’t make any attempt at escape,” he said. “I assure you, it would be futile.”
Trying not to be obvious, Giles studied the piece of crystal. From a distance it seemed perfectly transparent, its surface ground and polished to a smooth curve. A ring of brass surrounded it, plain under the man’s fingertips. It was evident from how he handled it that the disk was some manner of weapon, or an object of power.
No, Giles realized suddenly, it wasn’t a disk. It was a lens.
“Here you are,” the man said, and handed Giles the paper sack. “A late lunch. I know what it’s like to be hungry.”
Giles didn’t think he could eat, but when he opened the bag, the aroma of fried food rushed out and he realized that he was famished. Even so, he set the fast-food meal on the wash-stand without further examination.
“It’s perfectly wholesome,” the familiar-looking man said. “Wholesome by colonial standards, at least.” He paused. “I owe you an apology, I suppose. Perhaps several.”
“Well, never let it be said that I’m not a forgiving sort,” Giles said. “If I can just trouble you for a ride back to my residence—”
The man shook his head. “It’s not that simple, I’m afraid,” he said. There was nothing of menace in his voice, and he spoke with great culture and style. Perversely, Giles found himself warming to the man. He seemed immensely likeable. “It’s too late for that. But if I’d realized that this city was home to a Watcher, I might well have pursued other opportunities, or undertaken things here differently. It’s too late for that, however.”
He knew about Watchers, and presumably about the Slayer, as well. As such things went, the Watchers Council, its reason for being and its operations, weren’t terribly secret, but neither were they common knowledge. The fact that his host knew of them said something of the man’s nature, and of the circles in which he likely moved.
“Do I know you?” Giles asked. Sometimes it was best to be direct. The sense of familiarity still gnawed.
“No,” the man said with a head shake. “You may know of me, however. We’re colleagues, of a sort.”
“You seem like the civilized type,” Giles said. “This is terribly awkward. Could I at least have your name?”
His host laughed. Like his voice, the sound was warm and rich. “I think not,” he said, still chuckling. “We both know that giving one’s name is to give power over one’s self.”
“That’s true in only a limited, technical sense,” Giles said dismissively. It was curiously refreshing to speak with someone who knew of such things and was willing to treat them seriously. “On a personal level—”
“If I give you my name, you’ll know who I am,” the man said. He didn’t laugh this time, but he smiled, revealing perfect teeth. His eyes twinkled. “That’s more power than I care to give you, Mr. Giles.”
“Oh,” the Watcher responded. “Of course.” With slight chagrin he reminded himself that this was a captor-captive situation, however politely staged, and not a discussion between learned colleagues. The man’s personal magnetism was undeniable, however, and it took conscious effort to resist. “What comes next, then?”
“You’ll stay here for a bit,” the man said. “After that I’m not sure.”
“Hostage?” Giles asked. “I warn you. Experience is that I don’t make a very good one.”
“Perhaps not,” came the reply. “But I’ve always found it wise to deprive an enemy army of its general. I rather fancy that your Slayer will be less inclined to interfere, absent your guidance.”
Giles managed a laugh. It echoed hollowly against the washroom’s hard surfaces. One thing he knew with grim certainty was that Buffy would never hesitate to act in his absence. Whether she would act wisely or not was another question altogether. Buffy was, in so many ways, completely unlike any other Slayer who had come before her.
“I’ll have to tell her you said that,” Giles said. “She’ll be quite amused.”
That netted him another nod. “I’m going to leave you here for now,” his host said. “Forgive the accommodations, but security, in this instance, is a more pressing concern than comfort. I’m sure you understand.”
“Quite.”
“Eat or don’t eat,” the man said. “It matters not to me. But attempt to escape or send for help in any manner, and I assure you, you’ll be stopped. These quarters are quite secure, and I’ve taken other safeguards beyond walls and locks.”
The door closed and the bolt slid home again. Giles made a quick inspection of the washroom and learned approximately what he had expected: The door was heavy and the walls were thick, and there was no window. The entire place was quite solid, however, clean and in excellent repair; presumably, it had been built or renovated only recently. The only way out was through the door, and going through the door meant going through the presumed guard outside as well. Without a weapon of any sort, he was at an extreme disadvantage.
For lack of anything better to do, he perched on the wash-stand and took inventory of the food bag. It looked beastly: deep-fried trash food of the sort that Americans devoured with such gusto. Even so, his own words to Buffy about blood sugar applied to him as well, so he selected the least of available evils. It was an ominous-looking thing that purported to be a fish sandwich. He began to eat. It was with his third bite that Giles remembered where he’d seen his captor’s face before.
It had been in the pages of a book.
Sunnydale had a history; there had been settlements on its site for hundreds of years. It was an old city, by California standards, and the public library’s holdings were impressive evidence of the long years that it had been in operation. The aboveground levels of the library were modern, nicely designed and brightly lit, but the lower levels were darker and more claustrophobic. That was where management stored the old books, the ones that almost no one ever asked for, but that were worth keeping for their historical or archival value. It was also where the bound periodical collection lived, thick volumes of aging paper that bowed the shelves. Each pseudo-leather spine was labeled in stenciled gilt letters, presenting title and dates, and volume and issue numbers.
Buffy and Willow were there now, the sole occupants of a reading room. After Willow’s fifth request for old newspapers, the librarian on duty had given up. She had led them to the long-term storage area—usually off-limits to browsers—explained how the file system worked, and left them to their own devices.
“See?” Willow asked. Her hair was mussed and her skin shiny with perspiration, but she seemed quite pleased with herself. “There’s plenty of stuff that’s not online. It never will be, either, most likely. It takes time to scan this stuff in.”
“And time is money, yeah, yeah, yeah,” Buffy said. With a sound like a thunderclap, she dropped another two volumes of bound newspapers onto the sturdy table. The librarian had provided them with a wheeled cart, but Buffy found it easier just to lug the huge tomes from point to point.
And huge they were, each with a page size slightly larger than a modern newspaper, each five inches thick or more, and each bound with thick boards that Buffy was sure could serve as armor in a pinch. These once had been the morgue copies of the local newspaper, and of the newspapers that had preceded it. Print started dying a long time ago, really, and as the morning and afternoon dailies ceased operations, they ceded their histories and files to the papers that succeeded them, or to the library. The bound periodical collection was a treasure trove, if you thought of stuff like this as treasure.
Buffy didn’t, not really. She didn’t even find the papers particularly interesting. Newsprint aged badly, becoming brittle and brown and issuing a telltale acidic miasma that made her eyes sting and her nose run. She recognized the historical value of such repositories but didn’t think they held any particular charm.
Willow was different, Buffy realized yet again. The other girl had a mind like a sponge, that absorbed information greedily and connected data
points in ways that Buffy could only dream of. She had a lot of data to deal with too. Willow was a voracious omnivore when it came to information. Her interests were diverse and far-ranging, and she had the kind of mind that seemed equally at home soaking up info on science or mysticism, with many stops in between. Buffy knew that she herself was bright, but she knew Willow was something more than that.
Even better, Willow was an expert researcher. She’d started with generalized requests, but in the hours since they’d been there, her search had become more focused as she found and followed leads. She had brought Giles’s legal pad with her and already filled more than half its remaining pages with notes of her own.
“Isn’t this fun?” she asked.
“Yeah, loads,” Buffy said. She inspected her nails. One had broken against a shelf’s support bracket. “What next?”
“Box Office Reports by Region for 1922, 1923, and 1924,” Willow said. “If they have ’em.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Buffy asked. “They’ve got everything else down here, don’t they?”
“Yup,” Willow said with an enthusiasm that bordered on outright cheerfulness. “Hollywood’s been in California for a long time.”
The librarian had provided them with a diagram of the lower-level stacks. Entertainment publications were on the far end of the floor, beyond the central elevator shafts and near the maintenance access tunnels. The shelving units here were particularly closely spaced, and Buffy, focused on the job at hand, hardly noticed the shadowed spaces between them.
She noticed when one of the shadows moved in her direction, though, and the blot of darkness resolved itself into something solid and real.
“Hey,” Angel said. He had a book tucked under one arm.
“Hey, yourself,” Buffy said, startled.
He had the most amazing way of sneaking up on a person, really, and not just in the literal sense. It was difficult sometimes for Buffy to believe that she’d known him for such a relatively short time, during which she’d seen him only intermittently. He’d become so much a part of her life that it seemed she’d always known him.
She wondered if he felt the same.
“What brings you here?” she asked. It was daylight outside, probably late afternoon. Buffy would have liked very much to be outdoors now, away from the dust and shadow, perhaps taking an afternoon stroll. But even a brief excursion into the direct rays of the sun would reduce Angel to ash.
“Tunnels,” the soft-spoken vampire said. He gestured at a nearby metal door. “Plumbing and electrical are through there, and they communicate with the storm sewers. I get around.”
She nodded. “Let me put that another way,” she said. “Why are you here?”
“Research,” he said.
“Yes, Willow,” Buffy replied, with sarcasm that was mild and gentle.
“No, really,” he said. He showed her his book: Cheap Thrills: A History of Offbeat Entertainment. The dust jacket was a lurid illustration of a gigantic dinosaur-like beast locked in combat with an oversize gorilla.
“Don’t you get enough of that kind of thing in real life?” she asked. The shelves she needed were another ten units over; she gestured for him to follow as she looked for Willow’s books.
“Too much, really,” Angel said.
“That doesn’t look like part of the bound periodical collection to me,” Buffy said. She eyed the shelves. The library’s collection of Box Office Reports by Region was incomplete. The volumes for 1922 and 1923 were where they were supposed to be, but then the sequence skipped ahead to 1926. Buffy shrugged and pulled the two target books, with the next one for good measure. Willow would let her know if she’d made the wrong decision.
“I was upstairs,” Angel said. “I was just leaving when I heard your voices.”
He didn’t say anything as they walked together back to the reading room where Willow waited. For an absurd moment Buffy thought he might offer to carry her books, like a student after school, but the offer never came. That was just as well, maybe; she wasn’t sure how she’d respond.
Buffy’s status as the Slayer made such niceties effectively superfluous. She might lack a vampire’s enhanced senses, but she was at least as strong as Angel. She was quite capable of bearing her own burdens, physically at least, and her personal preference for independent action predisposed her to do so.
Still, a girl liked to be asked.
“Hey, look who I found,” Buffy said as she re-entered the workroom.
Willow looked up from her notes, startled, and then she grinned. “Angel!” she said. “Using the night depository?”
“Not just yet, Willow,” Angel said as Buffy set the bound magazines in front of her. He looked around at the stacks of aging newspapers and magazines, and at Willow’s copious notes. “What is all this?”
“Research,” both girls said brightly.
“Have you heard about this sleeping sickness thing?” Buffy asked.
Angel looked at her. Very slowly, he said, “No, I haven’t.”
Buffy filled him in about the mysterious disorder that had struck so many of Sunnydale’s youth. When she finished her summary, she added, “That’s where Xander and Cordelia are now, at the hospital.”
Angel nodded. “I was wondering,” he said. “Buffy, this could be very serious. I’ve heard of things like this before. In Europe in the 1860s—”
“And in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in 1953,” Willow said.
Buffy and Angel looked at her but said nothing.
Willow continued, referring to her notes, “Forty-seven students in the local college fell asleep and didn’t wake up for three weeks. Ten didn’t wake up at all, ever. They fell asleep and they kept sleeping.”
Certain that she had their attention now, she continued. Springfield and Arlen, Pottersville and Bug Tussle, the location names were mostly obscure and picturesque, scattered across the United States and Canada. The dates she listed were similarly dispersed, following no cycle that was especially evident. One thing linked them all, though. After every paired date and location, Willow told them how many locals had fallen asleep and how many hadn’t woken up.
“And something else,” Willow said, concluding. “That’s why I wanted the box office magazines. It looks to me like every one of these incidents happened in conjunction with a new drive-in theater, or with new management at an existing one.”
“Wow,” Buffy said softly. “That’s quite a pattern. Why didn’t anyone catch it before?”
Willow shrugged. “It’s hard to see, really,” she said. “They happened so far apart, and over such a long time—”
“What about here?” Buffy demanded. “What about the ‘something bad’ that happened years ago, that everyone keeps talking about?”
“Don’t think so. There’s no report of anything like this happening here, ever,” Willow said. “At least, not before today.” She paused. “That’s where we made our mistake. Sunnydale and the drive-in weren’t part of the pattern; at least, they weren’t until now.”
“So no prior ‘something bad’?” Buffy asked. “Something Angel missed?”
He shot her a reproachful look.
“He didn’t miss anything,” Willow said. “Drive-ins are where this stuff happens. They’re the context, not the cause.”
“Oh.” Buffy loved Willow, but there were times when she hated how her friend talked.
“That explains it, then,” Angel said. “Here.”
He set his book on the table, opening it for their benefit. He pointed at a grainy photograph. “Look familiar?” he asked Buffy.
The image was eerily familiar. It was a werewolf, or a sort of werewolf. It was an unsettling fusion of man and beast, basically a human build but with animal-like head and claws. It wore a lettered varsity jacket.
“Anubis?” Willow said softly. That was the Egyptian god of the dead she’d mentioned days before, in the school library.
“No,” Buffy said slowly. “But there sure is a resemblance. This
is the critter Angel and I saw the other night.” She looked to her vampire paramour. “You said you’d never seen anything like that before,” she continued, half-accusing.
“I didn’t remember,” Angel said.
She looked at him doubtfully. Vampires were notorious for having good memories. They could carry grudges for hundreds of years.
He explained, “I must have caught a glimpse of a movie still, or an advertisement a long time ago. Not enough to register consciously, but enough to make some kind of impression. I had to work to dredge it up.”
“Wow,” she said again softly, with renewed respect. To remember an experience or an enemy across the long years was impressive enough. That he could recall something barely glimpsed reminded her just how different a kind of guy she had.
“It says here that Varsity Werewolf was a 1958 Skull Features release,” Willow said. “You guys ran into a refugee from a drive-in movie.” She turned some pages, then squealed in surprise. “Hey! Look!”
The book had a signature of color pages bound into its middle. One image was a sad-looking girl clad in pink and white. A caption identified her as the star of The Lonely Cheerleader.
“Uh-oh,” Buffy said.
Willow kept turning pages. Familiar-sounding titles leaped out at them from the book, scattered through it like chocolate chips in a cookie: Double Drunken Dragon Kung Fu Fight, Mysteries of Chainsaw Mansion, Caged Blondes. They were the component elements of the handbill Xander had distributed so eagerly.
Willow kept skimming the pages. She paused as another still caught her eye. It was from something called The Best Medicine, and featured a strikingly attractive blond woman in a nurse’s uniform. “Hello, Inga,” she said, looking at the nurse who had ransacked Giles’s holdings.
“How is this possible?” Buffy demanded, once she and Willow had explained to Angel the reason for their surprise.
“I don’t know,” he said, taking the book back. “Look.” He pointed at yet another captured image. It was of six burly gents riding motorcycles that were bigger than some cars. “Look familiar?” he asked.