A Coldness in the Blood

by Fred Saberhagen

  At first he thought he had found a bizarre kind of doll, but in fact it was nothing of the kind. To the vampire’s amazement and amusement, he was soon able to recognize it as an embalmed baby crocodile. Incredibly slender, doubtless having been disemboweled, and drained of its last drop of moisture, some thousands of years ago. Dark and faintly odorous, and threatening to crumble at the merest touch. The smell of it was very faint and vaguely pleasant, somewhere between dried flowers and old leather. It struck the visitor as odd, these Egyptian morsels in the middle of rural France—until he remembered that Napoleon Bonaparte had led a French army to the land of the pharaohs at the very close of the previous century, then only a few decades in the past.

  Carefully he replaced the oddity on the obscure shelf, for it seemed to him that he had more important things to think about.

  (And in the year of Our Lord Two Thousand and One, the dreaming vampire understood that a gutted, desiccated crocodile of such infantile stature would probably have fit very neatly into a certain small, thinshelled white statue.)

  Maybe, the hidden vampire thought, I should rehearse an explanation now, while I have the chance. It would be good to have one ready, just in case. Then I can at least say that I tried. You see, Monsieur, in truth I have dropped in on your wife to admire her stuffed crocodile . Not an easy sentence, perhaps, for even the advanced student of French to come up with on a moment’s notice.

  Had he been a breather, the dusty emission from his find would probably have forced him to sneeze, injecting a note of low bedroom farce into the potential impending tragedy.

  So matters were going in the closet. Meanwhile, out in the charged atmosphere of the bedroom, the lady had revived from her faint, her maid had helped her to a chair, and the unhappy husband and wife were at least speaking to each other again. The start of reconciliation? No, not likely. The husband was adamantly refusing to hear any belated confession, or attempt at negotiation.

  “You have sworn that there is no one there,” he repeated several times. And that, it seemed, was going to be the end of that.

  The concealed listener pondered: Would his dear companion of a few hours ago now have to present another serious sin to her confessor? It seemed to him a nice point for the theologians to wrangle about. She had taken a most solemn oath, swearing to what she was certain was a lie—although in objective fact it was essentially the truth. Once darkness fell again, stone walls would be no more obstacle to her secret lover than open windows.

  It had become very dark inside the closet when the wall-building was complete at last, though in fact it was not yet the middle of the day. There were hours of daylight to be got through, but the man inside was very old, and he could be very patient.

  Time passed. He had no trouble determining the exact moment when the shoulder of the spinning earth rose high enough against the sun to hide its radiance from central France. He could feel his powers returning promptly on schedule, as he had never doubted they would. From that moment, bricks and stones and mortar could hold him in no longer. A network of invisibly fine crevices existed in the thick outer wall, as they would in almost any barrier. Most of these defects were practically invisible, too thin to admit even a sharp knife blade, yet they easily sufficed to set him free.

  Drifting in mist-form through the early twilight just outside the house, the vampire took thought regarding his next move. Given Madame’s demonstrated concern for his welfare (she was still clinging to hopes that her husband would relax his vigilance long enough to permit her ordering the wall demolished and rebuilt, without his knowledge), it would have seemed very inconsiderate not to let her know that he had survived.

  Everything was working out at least as well as he could possibly have expected—perhaps better.

  He showed his face very briefly outside the parlor window, choosing a moment when his erstwhile companion happened to be looking in that direction, and her lord and master had his back turned. A smile, a wink, a slight wave of the raised hand to signify goodbye, and in the next instant the intruder was out of sight again.

  Monsieur turned round on hearing the strange noise that his wife uttered in that moment, but she had been given the essential second or two in which to avert her face from the window and close her eyes.

  The count was at bottom a very mundane fellow, and absolutely convinced that nothing could trump solid bricks and hardened mortar—except possibly money, gun-barrels, and his own warped conception of personal honor. By that last he chiefly meant that secretly and inwardly he lived in terror of being laughed at.

  Later that night, when the lady tiptoed out of her room, where her husband currently was snoring—doubtless she had in mind some desperate plea to Goron—the vampire intercepted her. He had been waiting in a hallway, confident of his ability to melt into darkness if someone should come along.

  Frozen in shock for a long moment at the sight of one she had seen so ruthlessly and horribly doomed, instead quite casually alive and well, she finally found the breath to demand in a fierce whisper: “How did you get out?”

  “There are ways,” he whispered in response. “The means of Mesmer.” This was a marvelously irrelevant answer, but still the best he had been able to think up in the time available. France was still strongly under the influence of the great wave of enthusiasm for Anton Mesmer’s hypnotic techniques, which had reached its peak a few decades back. It was an epoch when it seemed that the power of suggestion might be stretched to explain any marvel. By invoking Mesmer, he had given the lady a strange answer, but an enormously relieving one, so it was one she wanted to believe.

  He went on, trying to be soothing. “So, you see, when you swore that mighty oath that there was no one in your closet—you were telling the exact truth.”

  “You mean that all the time Goron was building that wall—?” And Madame’s pretty lips were soiled with an exotic oath. “I nearly died!”

  “Be assured, Madame, that I did not.”

  The vampire did his best to confirm the lady in her swift-rising hope that she had committed no serious sin in answering her husband as she did. Having known several good Jesuits, each of them more skilled in debate than the others, he was certain any one of them could have made a powerful argument for that point of view. And he felt confident that the lady herself was sure to convince herself that his argument was correct, as soon as she had been given a little time to think about it.

  The transformation did not take long. Even as the vampire watched, her life, her conscience, were visibly relieved of an enormous burden.

  But she was still afraid, and would not want to be reminded of the close call. “You must go, we must never see each other again.”

  Her ex-lover sighed, gallantly, as if the prospect of such loss were well-nigh insupportable. “I fear that you are right. But first, one question, Madame, if I may?”

  “What is it, then? In God’s name, be quick!”

  “There was a certain item in your closet that much intrigued me. I believe it to be actually the body of a small crocodile, dried out to the point of crumbling, mummified …”

  Her mouth flew open. “Are you insane? What do you care about that trash? Fly for your life, before he comes!”

  Once he was determined to find out something, he was not easily turned aside. “Nevertheless, I am intrigued. If you could just tell me—?”

  She nodded at him, so frantically that ringlets of her hair went all askew. “It is some kind of mummified crocodile, the Egyptians find them in the Nile, and worship them. They say the hot sun breeds them from the mud. My father was with Bonaparte, and brought it back—are you satisfied now? Then, in God’s name, flee!”

  Years later, when both man and wife were either dead or too old to worry about it any more, the vampire heard, almost by chance and from another of his own subspecies, how the husband had spent the next two weeks in his wife’s room, never letting her out of his sight for even a tenth of the time that would have been necessary to knock an escape hole i
n a wall of solid brick.

  For a time he wondered what the sequel to the story might be: Did the lady eventually, at some time when her lord and master was out of the way, order the wall torn down, saying she was tired of being deprived of the use of her closet? Or might she have suddenly remembered that one of her favorite gowns or hats was in there?

  Or was she never quite sure enough that she had really seen her endangered lover safe and free to risk any such bravado gesture?

  Maule woke from his eidetic trance to the realization that he was still stretched out exactly where he had lain down, in a high room of what had once been a magic castle, established on a millionaire’s strange whim in Illinois. The thunderstorm had passed; he had been aware only dimly of how it blessed his elevated spear. Now, small dust motes danced within a beam of restored sunlight, having that peculiar quality generally found in solar energy in late afternoon, slanting close above him as he lay.

  The uncanny old house, and the strange land around it, were unnaturally quiet.

  He was still alone—but he could feel that soon enough he would have company.

  ~ 5 ~

  It was midmorning when Joe Keogh finished the last leg of his drive home with Andy, cruising down the quiet, tree-shaded suburban street and turning into his curved driveway. Kate was there, actually standing in the driveway; she must have been keeping lookout from an upstairs window, and then run down to meet her returning menfolk. It was now more than twenty years since they’d first met, and Joe could tell from the angle of her slender shoulders, somewhat slumping, that she had been very worried but was now relieved.

  The proud thought crossed his mind that she hadn’t changed that much, in either face or figure, in twenty years. At least Joe couldn’t see that she had changed. She was still pretty, and if a few gray hairs showed in the blond, well, he had more gray than she did. Which was only natural, being eight years older.

  Kate clamped her son in a large hug as soon as Andy got out of the car, and then held him at arm’s length, evidently to satisfy herself that he looked, sounded, and acted practically normal. For the moment she demanded no explanations.

  After greeting his mother casually—as casually as he could in the midst of a bear hug—Andy said he was going to his room, and headed up the stairs. Joe noted with continuing relief that he was now walking quite steadily.

  As soon as their son had disappeared, Kate turned to her husband. “What happened?”

  Joe didn’t answer until they had gone into the house, and he had sunk into a big chair in the living room and had taken off his shoes, letting them fall to the floor, one slow thump after another. Then he said: “To Andy, not much, thank God. He got put to sleep for most of the night. I think that’s all it amounted to.”

  “But what—?”

  “Uncle Matt says it was some kind of hypnosis, perpetrator unknown, and it hit him too. Knocked him right out.”

  “Uncle Matt?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all that has anything to do with Andy. As far as I can tell.”

  A faint musical-mechanical note, a kind of electronic gong, came from upstairs: the sound of Andy’s old computer, the one he’d left at home when he moved out, being turned on. Kate welcomed it as a sign of normalcy.

  She found another chair and perched on the edge of its seat. Looking at her husband, who was not looking at her, she could see that there was much more to the affair than he had told her yet. Joe had his shoulder holster on, which was decidedly unusual, probably illegal, and he was making no effort to take it off.

  Impulsively she said: “I wish you would stay out of it.”

  “Wish I could. But we both know I can’t. I’ll go back, after I get another hour or two of sleep.”

  “Did he ask you to help?”

  “He wouldn’t come right out and ask. But he expected help, and I don’t blame him.”

  Old terrors and old excitements were drifting to the surface in Kate’s mind. There were certain events of twenty years ago that she had imagined were forgotten, but now it turned out they were not. And of course there were certain other events she knew she would never be able to forget. “Who else was there? At his place?”

  Joe frowned thoughtfully. For his wife’s peace of mind, he decided not to mention Connie. “A man, a breather, named Tamarack—ever run into him, or hear of him?”

  She shook her head.

  “How about someone, man or woman, called Flamel?”

  “No.”

  “You remember a man named Dickon?”

  She shivered a little, then nodded. “Vaguely. He was one of Them, as I recall.”

  Joe nodded. “I didn’t see him, but Maule said he was there last night. But I don’t think Dickon was the hypnotist. Maule says he’s a real coward. Something about how Dickon could manage to terrify himself by watching old movies about walking mummies.”

  Kate could no longer keep from pursuing it. “Just what all did happen last night?”

  In response to that, her husband just looked at her, which was definitely a bad sign. Kate changed the subject slightly. “How about him? Is he all right?”

  “I guess so. But actually Andy hasn’t been to his place at all.”

  Kate blinked. “He hasn’t?”

  “Neither have I. No one you know has been up to his condo recently.”

  “Oh.” There was a pause, in which Kate studied her husband’s unexpressive face. “You’re chewing gum. You only do that when you’re trying hard not to go back to smoking.”

  “I’m chewing gum,” Joe acknowledged at last. It was as far as he would go.

  Taking off his coat but not his holster, stretching out on the sofa in his living room late on Wednesday morning, Joe managed to catch an hour and a half of sleep before lunch. It helped to make up for what he had lost.

  Not that his nap was all that restful. One problem was that it included a strange dream, in which he found himself running through a hot and sunbaked street, while people were chasing him with knives. Rousing a little before noon, he considered what other pressing business affairs might have to be dealt with today.

  Letting out a sigh, he looked at his watch and stirred as if he were going to get up. “I should have called the office.”

  Kate was sitting nearby, feet in house slippers up on a stool, thin portable computer unfolded on her lap. Joe supposed she would be working on the household accounts, or maybe on something for one of the charities with which she was involved. She said: “I already did. Told them something special had come up, and I didn’t think you’d be in. They didn’t seem all that worried, so you should get some rest.”

  “Thanks.” He lay back on the sofa with another sigh, a trifle uneasy that the office should be getting along so well without him. But soon he was going to have to get up anyway.

  As if reluctantly, Kate spoke again. “Your client at the Field Museum called too. I got the impression it was moderately urgent.”

  Joe nodded. “Okay, I’ll give him a ring. Actually there’s something I want to ask him.”

  Going to the telephone in his home office, Joe recalled his own visit to the museum a few days earlier, his talk in the office of a worried-looking administrator.

  Having settled into his office chair and put his feet up, he soon had the administrator’s deputy on the phone.

  So far her problems had nothing like the urgency of Maule’s. “We had another event last night,” her crisp voice reported. “But it’s the same situation as before, no real intruders. The engineers have about ruled out any electronic problems.”

  Joe did his best to sound calm and capable and unsurprised. “I’ve been looking into a couple of things that might have a connection with your problem. I’d like to e-mail you something and get your opinion on it, if you don’t mind.”

  Moments later, he was uploading into his computer the digital photo he had taken of the strange little wooden panel. Taking an on-screen look at the pi
cture of the smashed statue, he decided against sending that to anyone; it would be hopeless to ask anybody to interpret that kind of mess. Maybe, the next time he went to the museum, he’d show them his sample of antique tape.

  Once the photo of the panel was in the system, it was only the work of another minute to send it out by e-mail.

  Just as it departed, Kate opened the door of his study and put her head in. “Ready for some lunch?”

  “Sounds good. Maybe a peanut butter sandwich.”

  “Have some soup too. Something hot will do you good.”

  “There’s one more thing I ought to take care of first.” In another minute he had called his office in downtown Chicago, getting one of his junior employees started at the task of finding out whatever she could about people named Flamel.

  A few minutes later, Joe was at the kitchen table with his son, while Kate set out paper bowls of soup. The Keoghs were well able to afford regular household help, but so far Kate preferred to stick with only the cleaning ladies, who came in once a week. She also lacked enthusiasm for washing dishes.

  “I’m going back in,” Joe informed his wife, blowing on a hot spoonful. “There’s a certain place in Old Town I want to take a look at. Some kind of a fire last night. Do we have a morning paper?”

  Meanwhile, Andy had remained incurious about what his parents might be up to, an attitude they were ready to welcome as additional evidence of normalcy. Their son also seemed content to spend the remainder of the day loafing around the house. When Joe went out again, he did not ask Andy if he wanted a ride back to his own city apartment.

  Maule had advised Joe Keogh not to return today to Maule’s apartment, because Maule was planning to be elsewhere.