A Coldness in the Blood

by Fred Saberhagen

  The man was smiling faintly. “Had it on my mantelpiece back in the living quarters, trying to decide what to make of it, and the cat knocked it off. It fell on the fire irons and chipped. Ever meet a clumsy cat? Maybe this one knew what it was doing.”

  The animal, massive and dark-furred, seemed to come from nowhere, and hopped up on the counter even as it was being talked about. As Joe watched, it gave the dark spot on the statue’s surface one curious sniff, and then turned away disdainfully.

  “Does look like it might have some history behind it,” Joe remarked.

  “Maybe you could tell me something about that.”

  “How would I know?”

  “You could tell me that too. See, when the little chip flaked off, some interesting contents came into view.” And the man in the black T-shirt went on to explain to Joe how he, aware that something very unusual had been revealed, but not at all sure what, had poked at it very carefully and had at last taken a small sample of the organic-seeming material now visible inside.

  Joe felt compelled to make some comment. “That a fact?”

  “Fact. Right now that sample is at a lab at one of California’s famous universities. You don’t need to know which one.”

  “I don’t see why I’d need to know that, no.”

  “I expect I’ll get a report in a day or two, should provide me with some evidence of what I’ve got. Until I can figure out what the something is, I didn’t want to take any chances. You from around here, by the way?”

  “No, actually.”

  “Let me guess. The way you sound—Chicago?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Yeah. Well, how much would you give me for one of these?” He placed the tip of a huge finger precisely on the statue’s head.

  “A thousand dollars,” Joe promptly offered. He thought that starting any higher than that would be sure to set off an alarm in the other’s suspicious brain. At best the deal would certainly be delayed.

  “Apiece?”

  Joe tried to project signals of an inward struggle, of a man being forced to the limit of his budget. “Eight hundred apiece.”

  The biker behind the counter was somewhat overweight, but the hands he spread out looked strong enough to tear up a Chicago phone book.

  “When a tough guy from Chicago comes offering a thousand bucks for my little thing here—that makes me think I better wait a little, until I can figure out just why he thinks it’s worth that much.”

  Joe gave an indifferent shrug. “I like its looks. And I wouldn’t count on someone coming in tomorrow with a better offer—how long have you had them here?”

  The man didn’t answer that.

  “All right, a thousand each.” Joe let his shoulders sag. “But that’s the absolute limit.”

  The man was smiling faintly, very slightly shaking his head. “I’m about to close up for the night. We can both think the situation over. Wouldn’t want to make a deal that left either of us unhappy. I’m open again at nine in the morning, if you want to come back.”

  Joe backed away a step or two. “Might do that. Anywhere around here that a tough guy from Chicago might be able to get a hotel room?”

  “My name, by the way, is Turner.” The shop owner reached into one of his pockets, and there followed an exchange of business cards.

  Then Turner helpfully described a couple of possibilities for his potential customer.

  Between gasoline prices and the fear of power outages, the tourist season was a little slow, and Joe had no trouble finding a guest cottage. This was the simplest accommodation readily available, surrounded by a fantastic floral display of bushes. He paid a high cash price in advance, and signed for the bed with a name not legally his own, but which matched that on the business cards he was currently carrying, and for which he could have produced additional documentation on demand. On this occasion no one demanded anything.

  A restaurant chosen at random from a handful within walking distance served the visitor a tasty dinner—also paid for in cash—for which he had little appetite. After dinner he turned in early for some much-needed sleep. The biker wasn’t going anywhere tonight, not when he hoped to find out more about his treasure in the morning. But Turner would probably not be getting much sleep, either. Joe set his mental alarm clock for 5:00 A.M. local time, which meant 7:00 in Chicago.

  When Joe returned to the antique shop just a little after sunrise on Saturday morning, freshly shaved and showered, and munching a jelly doughnut picked up on the way, he studied the place carefully as he approached. Again he had parked a block away. The sign on the front door showed the place was definitely CLOSED. The steel cagework had been deployed over the window glass, but Joe could see in well enough to determine that neither statue was any longer on display.

  At the moment, streets and sidewalks were practically empty of strolling or jogging people or moving cars. Going to one side of the building, sliding around and through a heavy growth of exotic bushes, advancing one step at a time with great care, he discovered that the back door had been forced open, with little splinters of raw wood showing around the lock, and then reclosed, but not quite tightly. Whatever alarm system might have been attached must have been disabled.

  A little whimper of sound was coming from somewhere inside. Joe’s first impression was that it might be coming from an unhappy cat. From there, the possibilities went downhill.

  He thought of knocking on the door frame, but then he decided not. The sun was well up now, and he was ready to take a chance.

  The battered door swung open in almost perfect silence upon well-oiled hinges, revealing a small and simple kitchen. From farther inside the living quarters came additional sounds, a little cheerful whistling, and then a repeat of the mewing, like a suffering cat.

  Joe Keogh needed something like a full minute to advance some twelve or fifteen feet inside the house, traversing the tiny kitchen and a short angle of hallway. Just ahead, a hanging curtain blocked a doorway. With the curtain where it was, Joe still couldn’t see anything of importance, but with every step he advanced he could hear a little better.

  When he got within an arm’s length of the curtain, he could see around its edge to get a fair view of the room beyond.

  He owned a nice home, about two thousand miles away in suburban Chicago, and for several minutes now a part of him had been wishing that he had stayed there. Now the urgency in the wishing ramped up sharply. As usual, Joe Keogh recognized a vampire when he took the trouble to look at one carefully.

  A nosferatu visitor, one who happened to have something very wrong with his head, but could still manage a little cheerful whistling, was standing over the man in the black T-shirt. The latter was stretched out on a table, which now and then creaked under his weight, and something had been done to him to keep his massive limbs from moving. Right now something that looked even worse was being done to him as well. The vampire was bending over him, sampling blood like vintage wine, meanwhile slowly peeling his scalp from his living head, like taking the skin off an orange.

  He who feasted on Mr. Turner was a big man too, maybe not quite as big as Turner himself, but Joe had no doubt that this one was perhaps an order of magnitude stronger.

  For the last half minute Joe had been moving his right hand slowly, concentrating on complete silence in the effort to get his revolver out of his shoulder holster.

  Now the vampire turned his head a little, affording Joe a better look at the horrible injury that had left the predator with no teeth to speak of, forcing him to forgo biting in his quest for blood. About half the lower jaw was missing, the great wound sheathed in repulsive scar tissue and raw scabs. Knowing something of the nosferatu, Joe could imagine that it was halfway through the process of growing back, from one side to the other. No teeth were visible, except for the broken stump of one of his two main fangs, the eyeteeth of his upper jaw. The stump looked too stubby to be of much use, though at the moment it was bluntly swollen.

  Maule had des
cribed a vampire, Lambert, who had come to look like that, since saying and doing things displeasing to Uncle Matt. At the moment Lambert looked not much better off than his victim, except that the fresh blood around what was left of Lambert’s mouth was not his own.

  It would all have to do with the little statues, of course, and where were they? No sooner had Joe thought that than he saw them. There they were, or what was left of them, rather, a thick scattering of white chips and larger fragments on a sideboard at the far side of the small parlor, under a pink-shaded lamp. The top of the sideboard seemed to have been swept clear of other objects, to make a kind of workbench, and some blackish organic stuff was scattered with the white chips.

  Meanwhile, some part of Joe’s suspicious mind kept telling him how very strange it was that he could have worked his way as close as this to a nosferatu without his presence being detected—but suddenly an explanation suggested itself: Lambert’s massive head injuries might well have affected his hearing.

  Right now other matters were claiming Lambert’s full attention. Streams of Turner’s blood were simply running down on the table, being wasted. He continued to make peculiar noises while he was being peeled, but none of his noises was loud enough to be heard out on the street. Joe could only suppose, watching from as remote a psychic position as he could manage, that the vampire had done something to Turner, maybe to his throat, that prevented any serious outcry.

  Now at last Joe had his pistol out. The extraction had taken just a fraction of a minute longer because of the four inches of cylindrical silencer on the end of the stubby revolver barrel.

  Lambert may have heard that last, comparatively rapid movement, for suddenly he lifted his head and looked through the gap beside the curtain, directly at Joe.

  With the back of his left hand, Joe pushed the curtain completely open. To Lambert he said quietly: “You did your best to kill my son.”

  Lambert’s eyebrows went up. Of course he would know about wooden bullets. And now, though caught off-guard in daylight, he was good at dodging them—but in his half-crippled condition he wasn’t quite good enough. Joe’s first shot, making only a vicious little spit of sound, just grazed the vampire’s turning, dodging torso. The second missed its target altogether, as Lambert faked a flight through the doorway leading to the shop, then spun around instead to charge.

  That was a mistake. The third shot split Lambert’s breastbone, the wooden impact sending him crashing back and down, shattering and crushing antiques. Joe stepped in through the curtained doorway, took calculated aim at the writhing figure on the floor, and put a fourth little slug of lignum vitae, so heavy it wouldn’t float in water, right through the nosferatu head.

  That finished him off. Joe had been half-expecting Lambert’s body to disappear almost at once, as was the way with elder vampires, but evidently Lambert was too young to go that route. Therefore the Carmel cops would sooner or later find his body, or some remainder of it anyway, and take an interest in his killing. So Joe would do well to get rid of the pistol—but not just yet. He decided that he’d better reload instead.

  What was left of Turner had been knocked off the table in the flurry of action, and when Joe bent over him he could see that what was left of the man’s life had now run out. Keeping his feet out of a puddle of blood, Joe turned to the sideboard and ran his gaze over the debris of the statues in the light of the pink lamp. Only white chips and what looked like mud.

  A moment later, Joe was kneeling beside the remains of Lambert, forcing himself to go quickly through the vampire corpse’s pockets. There was nothing like a magic gemstone to be found.

  He had straightened up again, and was about to start the process of reloading his revolver, when a faint sound came from the rear of the building. Someone—or something—was trying the broken rear door. Was opening it and coming slowly in.

  There was only one other way out. Joe moved with deliberate speed to get himself through the other curtained doorway, leading out into the shop. There he was delayed for a full second, by the mortal certainty that if he opened the shop door leading out to the sidewalk, all kinds of alarms were going to go off.

  As he looked back through a slit of curtain into the room he had just left, his blood turned cold inside his veins. The figure that had just entered the little parlor from the rear looked a lot more like a crocodile, walking on its hind legs, than it did a man.

  Sobek. Joe came near whispering the name aloud. The thing was not hurrying, but careless of what noise it made. It took in the parlor with one sweeping look, then went straight to the sideboard, where it briefly studied the remains of two crushed statues, obviously finding in the litter nothing of great interest.

  In the next moment Sobek turned, and his inhuman yellow eyes brushed Joe. The man cringed, certain that he had been noticed. But it was as if the monster had no interest in the accidental presence of another human being.

  A dead vampire, however, was quite another matter. Sobek effortlessly picked up Lambert’s slowly shriveling body and began to eat him, approaching the meal in gourmet style.

  Forgetting about alarms, Joe grabbed the gnarled antique knob of the shop’s front door, at the same moment holstering his revolver. A moment later he was out on the sidewalk, walking briskly in the lovely California morning.

  Some ten minutes later, there was movement on a beach on the fringe of Carmel’s residential area, where huge gray twisted logs of driftwood lay stacked in bizarre shapes.

  The Crocodile had come out of the water here, shortly before dawn, leaving a slight trail as he crawled up the beach, a trail that abruptly changed from slide marks in sand to a set of prints made by the shod feet of a manlike walker on two legs.

  Now, having accomplished the same transformation in reverse, he was going back into the water again.

  A young man in formal evening dress, tie undone and reeling with the effects of an all-night drug binge, regarded the apparition with more amusement than terror. “Hey, buddy, you got the wrong coast. This ain’t Florida.”

  The Crocodile gave him one yellow-eyed look over its scaly shoulder, but returned no answer as it slid into the gentle surf.

  ~ 15 ~

  In Illinois, the train had stopped at Naperville and Mendota, Princeton and Galesburg, before rumbling on into darkness at Fort Madison, Iowa, on the west bank of the Mississippi. A little before eleven o’clock, local time in yet another state, the Southwest Chief slowed again. This time the darkness outside the car dissolved in a bright glare of artificial light.

  Andy checked his watch. “This has to be Kansas City. Should we get out and stretch our legs?” He thought they might as well, they sure as hell weren’t sleeping.

  “Okay.” Dolly sounded resigned but not unwilling. “Sorry I’m keeping you awake.”

  “Forget it.”

  Putting on their shoes, they descended to pace the open concrete platform. The night was warm, somewhat sticky with humidity. Swarms of wanton insects assaulted electric lights on poles. At this hour, very few other passengers had decided to get up and stretch their legs. Most of those who did were looking for some relief from their long ordeal in single seats in coach.

  “Andy, I don’t feel like—what’s the matter?”

  He took her by the arm and pulled her to a spot on the platform where there was no one near. “Thought I just saw something—that darted under the train. Like there was something, someone, moving right under our car.” It was too dark under the train for anyone to see much of anything, but he could tell that there hardly seemed room for a human being.

  Quickly Dolly bent to look. None of the few other people near at hand seemed to be paying the least attention to their goings-on.

  Now Andy heard strange sounds that seemed to emanate from right beneath the train: a scrape of something hard in gravel, a muffled outcry from what might well have been a human throat. His imagination, well-stocked of late with images of horror, immediately presented him with several gory scenarios, each worse t
han the one before.

  No one else on the platform was looking under the train. No one appeared to be hearing or seeing anything bizarre.

  He bent once more, trying hopelessly to see, then straightened up. “I’m not going to crawl under and look.” He took Dolly’s arm in a firm grip. “Let’s get back on.”

  Reboarding, they passed a sleepy-looking trainman on watch at the door. When they were well inside the car, she whispered: “Andy. There was someone under there. There was, I swear it.”

  “I know.” He was wondering how much more her nerves could take. Or his.

  Shortly after eleven, the Southwest Chief pulled out of Kansas City, only a few minutes behind schedule.

  Andy wasn’t sure whether there had actually been anyone under the train or not, or what might have happened to them. But a few minutes in the open air seemed to have done Dolly some good. She seemed to have recovered some energy and alertness, and no longer wanted to be held.

  “Andy, I’m still afraid to sleep. Don’t know when I’ll have another chance to take a shower, so I’m going to try it now.” The coffin-sized subcompartment containing the shower did double duty as a private toilet, and so far they had used it only in the latter function.

  “Maybe I can wash some of this fuzz out of my brain,” she added. Then, absently, as if it did not really matter: “I trust you to close your eyes when necessary.”

  “Sure.” He thought the only difficulty he might have with his eyes would be in trying to keep them open.

  She opened the narrow door to the tiny plumbing module and surveyed the interior, eyeing the nozzle overhead beside the shielded light, and the drain in the floor. “Looks just about like the shower in my mom’s old RV. Close down the potty lid and pull the chain for water.”

  “Okay.”

  “I have to leave my towel out here, ’cause there’s not going to be a dry spot inside this iron maiden. My shotgun’s under the covers in the upper berth, just in case you need it.”