Nightblood

by T. Chris Martindale

  “Is he down there?”

  The soldier didn’t answer. “Stay close,” was all he would say as he started down the fragile-looking steps.

  “Now wait a minute,” Bean complained, “I never said I was going down there. . . .” But Stiles was already disappearing into the darkness. The deputy looked around him and frowned. “‘You’re an asshole, chum, I hope you know that.” He racked the pump on the Mossberg, took out his own flashlight, and followed close behind.

  His first impression was the chill. It was at least fifteen degrees colder down there, like a butcher’s freezer. Bean’s breath hung in front of his face like an arctic cloud, limiting what visibility he had. He was happy to reach the bottom and just be off the rickety stairs. He found Stiles already weaving a path through the decades of debris gathered there.

  “Is he here?” Charlie whispered. “Do you feel him?”

  “I don’t know. It’s faint, it’s . . .” The soldier looked around, puzzled. “It’s fading. But how? He couldn’t have gotten out of here.” He shined his light on the outside door to the cellar, found it still nailed shut and probably blocked by a ton of rubble as well. “He has to be here, Charlie,” Stiles muttered in frustration. But then, suddenly, he tensed. He turned to the nearest wall and the crooked old bank of shelves that stood there, and without warning he raised his shotgun and fired. Compact thunder rolled through the cellar as the blast splintered two shelves and left a melon-sized hole in the thick back panel. It was certainly large enough to see through—not to a brick wall beyond, but to the blackness of a hidden passageway.

  Bean helped him shoulder the creaking mass of wood aside and they shined their flashlights into the narrow opening. It revealed a cave-like chamber, dank and malodorous, the walls glistening with streams of seepage, and water standing in places on the floor. In its center was a table with thick ropes secured to the head and foot. “Oh, Lord,” Stiles sighed as he inspected the ropes and saw how they had been snapped in haste. “He had someone down here. That’s why he came back—for his reserve supply. Charlie, we can’t let him feed!” He searched the chamber in earnest, found a crawlway opposite the entrance that was barely large enough for a grown man. But it didn’t stop the soldier. He dropped to his hands and knees and scrambled into the darkness.

  “Wait up, dammit!” Bean cursed, mostly for fear of losing his guide. He squeezed through as best he could, feeling particularly vulnerable in those tight quarters, but it was only a few feet before the crawlway opened into a much larger tunnel. He clambered to his feet to find Stiles standing nearby, looking about warily. It could have been a natural cavern—there were rock formations present, dribbling pale groundwater from the ceiling like mother’s milk from limestone teats. But the cave roof was shored up in places, supported by big wooden beams that braced the ceiling and walls. “Well, this is something,” the deputy said. “I never heard about any mine tunnels around here.” He shined his light in either direction and saw that the passage split in two each way. “Well, at least you know how he got out ahead of the boys that night. Which way, Chris?”

  “I don’t know,” Stiles sighed, and his shoulders sagged with the admission. “But he’s definitely gone. I can’t feel him anymore. And there’s no telling where these tunnels end up. He could be anywhere. I fucked up, Charlie. He’s already feeding again. Getting stronger. Damn!”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll find him.” Bean looked around. “Pretty old network, if you ask me. Could go anywhere. Too bad there’s no one around these days who’d know just where.”

  Stiles glanced at him, and the deputy saw a gleam in his eyes. “Wait a minute,” the soldier whispered, ushering Bean back through the crawlspace. He used both of their flashlights to illuminate the small chamber. The table and ropes had been moved there recently, but the rest of the debris present was older, much older, and gave the room a sense of identity. There was a smaller table, playroom size, with equally small chairs, all standing in a puddle of water and half-rotted. In the corner, a wooden box with an engraved lid was in much the same condition. There were rocking horses by the wall, two of them, each sitting crookedly on softening blades. Their wooden faces had grown whiskery with mildew. “Toys?” Stiles wondered aloud. “In a cave?”

  Charlie accepted it all with a shrug. “Haven’t you ever built a fort, Stiles? A clubhouse, someplace to hide out and play?” He looked around. “This would’ve made a really good one. If it didn’t leak so much.”

  Stiles nodded. “Maybe it didn’t, years back. This is connected to Danner’s basement, remember?” He was standing by a rocky shelf in the wall, cluttered with odds and ends, the cast-offs of childhood. The shelf was dry and some of the things had escaped the ravages of mildew, like the wooden box perched there. Its exterior, like the horses, had grown green and fuzzy, but the interior still held little wooden cowboys and their horses, remarkably well preserved. The troop of cavalry soldiers, complete with bugler, were hand-carved and painted, and left with an endearing lack of detail. There were two of each soldier. He put them back and rummaged through the other things on the shelf, the two harmonicas, the slingshots, the toy six-shooters. Two of each. Two of everything. Even the books. Their time-worn covers were all curled and yellow, all but indistinguishable from one another. He could barely identify titles like Treasure Island and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the usual adventures of youth, although most children don’t enjoy first editions. Beneath them he found two copies of a school primer in somewhat better condition—at least it didn’t crumble in his hands. He flipped open the parchment-like cover of one. In bold, young letters, the name Sebastian Danner was hand-printed. “We were right. This was Danner’s playground.”

  He picked up the other, opened the cover. On the inside, in a slightly less legible scrawl, was Nathan Danner.

  Bean caught the change in his expression. “What? What is it?”

  Stiles grinned wryly, satisfied that the pieces were finally falling into place. The walled-up prison, partially disinterred. The old man Del saw in the woods. Two of every toy. “Maybe there is someone we can ask about the tunnels,” he said, opening up the toy-soldier case. He held out two identical officers. “Don’t you get it? Twins.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The residents of the Shady Rest boardinghouse gathered in the parlor at nearly one in the morning. All were dressed in their pajamas and robes, but none could sleep. Not with the peculiar happenings in the town below.

  “It was strange enough with the phone dead all day,” Jessie Shively said, sitting on the arm of Ida Fleming’s chair and wringing her hands unconsciously. “But now, with someone lightin’ off fireworks at this hour—”

  “Fireworks, you say?” Jim Taggart grunted without knowing what the hell they were talking about.

  “Wasn’t fireworks, Jessie,” Hubert said as he peered out the window. “Those were gunshots. And those explosions . . . well, who knows what that was all about.”

  George Bailey had a pretty good idea. But he sank into his chair and said nothing.

  Why hadn’t he done something before now? he wondered. He knew what was happening, what was going to happen. But he just cowered and hid his head, just as he’d always done. It was just a matter of time now, he thought. Till his nightmares came up the hill. He and the others had been lucky so far—he figured those things had been too busy preying on their own families and friends to think of the old house on the hill and its forgotten lodgers. But that would change. Tomorrow we move, he decided. Tomorrow we get a car and we leave this place, this town, this entire state. . . .

  “Hey,” Hubert said, leaning closer to the window. “I think I saw someone out there.”

  Bailey’s eyes widened.

  Jessie moved alongside the towering Mr. Ranall. “Where? I don’t see anyone.”

  “Out there by the trees.” He turned toward the door. “I’ll just go see who it is.”<
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  “NO!” Bailey snapped, lumbering out of his chair. His stridency gave them pause. He went to the window and pulled down the shade. “Nobody goes outside.”

  “Why not, George?” Hubert wanted to know. “We can’t just stay in here. I just want to find out what the hell’s going on.”

  “Just wait till morning,” the older man asked plaintively. “Please.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Avina Atchison came down the hall from the kitchen and poked her hairnetted head through the parlor doors. “Who on earth could that be at this hour?” She headed for the door.

  “Don’t answer it!” Bailey wailed, racing to catch her.

  He reached the hall just as the landlady was opening the door, nudging her aside even as he reached into his robe and drew forth his big rosewood cross. He thrust it through the open doorway at the figures there and commanded, “Get back! You are not invited, I do not invite you here! Get back!”

  A hand reached out and plucked the crucifix from his grasp. “You won’t need this, Mr. Bailey,” Charlie Bean told him. “We just need to ask a few questions.”

  “Deputy!” Avina exclaimed, ushering him and his associate into the house. Then her eyes shifted to Stiles’s black-and-blue face. “Good Lord, what’s going on?” Hubert and Jessie came out into the hall just then. Ida stayed seated. Jim stayed asleep.

  “What were all those gunshots, deputy?” Hubert asked before noticing that each man carried a shotgun. “What is this? Are we under siege?”

  “You could say that,” Charlie nodded. He looked at George. “We need to talk to you, Mr. Bailey. It’s important.”

  The old man recognized the beaten-up Stiles from that night at the diner. He knew what this would be about. “Come to the dining room,” he said softly. Then, to the rest of them, he warned, “Don’t nobody open that door again, you hear me? Nobody!”

  They followed him down the hall and into the dining room, where he turned to them with a look of resignation. “You know, don’t you?”

  Stiles nodded. “Who you are . . . but not which one.”

  Bailey sat down at the table wearily. “A long time ago,” he told them, “my name was Sebastian Danner. I take it you’ve met my brother, Nathan.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Bean said. “We thought he was you.”

  “A lot of people used to confuse us,” he told them. His face was etched darkly with the remembrance, but the words flowed nonetheless. They had been held inside too long. “But we weren’t nothing alike. Not inside, where it counts. There was always something wrong about Nate. Something bad. You know, the happiest day of my life was when he left here. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going, not me, not our parents. He just left. And mind you, they didn’t say so, but they breathed a great sigh of relief as well. It was like a weight had left our shoulders, freeing us. Well, our father got sick not long after that and died the next year and Mother the year after that. But Nathan didn’t come back for either funeral. He may not have known about it, but I doubt it would’ve changed anything. He was just like that. I finally convinced myself to get on with my life, that Nate was dead. And in a way, I guess I was right.

  “I was married not long after that.” His eyes misted, and he turned away to hide it. “We’d made big plans. We were both of a mind for a large family. Lynn Anne was even carrying our first when I went away to Indianapolis on business. But while I was away, Nathan came home. She didn’t realize it wasn’t me, not until . . .” His voice cracked. The memories were vivid, even after so many years. “When I came back a couple of nights later, I found her waiting for me. In our bed! Lord God, laying her to rest was the hardest thing I have ever done. Ever completed, at least. Aw, but you were with me then, weren’t you, Lord? It was with His hand on my shoulder that I hunted down Nate’s other victims, his servants, and I killed them all, and then I found him too and he begged and pleaded for me not to destroy him then and there, and . . . And before God, I could not carry it through. We were . . . are twins. Despite it all, there has always been that bond between us, that damning tie. I mean, he was dark, evil. He had murdered my wife. But somehow, deep down, I still loved him. I imagine it’s difficult to understand how two brothers can hate so well yet love so much.”

  Stiles said nothing. Bean continued the questioning. “So instead you walled him up in the basement.”

  Bailey nodded. “What else could I do? I couldn’t just let him go, not after what he’d done to Lynn Anne. But I couldn’t destroy him either. So I imprisoned him in the basement, and then I ran as far and as fast as I could. And I tried to forget. I went to Chicago, and then to the coast, and finally to Europe. I ran for forty years, afraid to come home, afraid to face myself, what I’d done. But always, down deep, I knew it was up to me. It was my responsibility. That was why I established a trust to take care of the house over all those years, and it’s what made me come back in the long run. But I didn’t want to be connected to that place or even that name. So I took George Bailey from a movie, and I moved back to town and I tried to work up the courage to finish the job, once and for all. But while I stammered and stalled, the years slipped by. I went out there maybe a hundred times, but I could never get past the basement door. I could feel him down there. Waiting.

  “I stalled as long as I could. I kept secretly hoping I would die first and then the responsibility would be taken from my shoulders. But then the trust petered out and the land was condemned and they started talking about eminent domain and a housing addition—I knew I had to finish it once and for all, before any of that got started. Before they freed him. So I went back out there Friday night and I was determined this time and I . . . almost did it. I began to dismantle the wall and I was about halfway through when I heard him in there. He was scratching at the other side, digging, freeing himself. I froze. I peed in my pants, too. And I ran. Again.”

  Stiles had already figured as much out. “You came across the Miller boys in the woods, didn’t you? It all fits. Well, let me fill you in, Mr. Danner. Your brother is out. He’s taken about half of Isherwood already, and unless we stop him he’ll take it all. Now, where do the tunnels under Danner House lead?”

  Bailey’s face slackened. “The tunnels? Lord, it’s been seventy years, friend. I don’t think I . . . Nope, I can’t remember. I’ve slept since then, you know.”

  “Nathan hasn’t.”

  That sobered the old man. He searched his hazy memory. “It’s been so long. As I recall, one led to the caretaker’s shack at the edge of the property, and one may have went to the Hancock land, just the other side of ours. And then . . . oh, let me see now—”

  The unexpected peal of the doorbell echoed through the house. It rung a second time and then a third, impatiently. The three men looked at each other, but there was no need for words. Their expressions conveyed their panic. With no more thought, Bean and Stiles were through the dining room, heading down the hallway. They could already hear voices up ahead.

  Mrs. Atchison. “Well, I never. It’s like Grand Central Station around here.”

  The squeak of a wheelchair. Uncle Jim’s croaking Hoosier twang. “Don’t worry, Viney. Ah’ll git it.”

  The door unlatched.

  Bean and Stiles broke into a run.

  Cold and hollow, a lifeless belch of a voice. “Our car broke down. Can we use your phone?”

  . . . almost to the entry hall . . .

  The old man’s laugh. “Sure. Y’all come on in.”

  Y’all. You all. Every one of you.

  No!

  Stiles burst into the lobbylike entry just as a woman’s scream rang out, shrill and piercing straight to the spine. Avina Atchison was on the floor, struggling with a young man clad in dirty pajamas. A crimson stream was already jetting from the open punctures in her throat, and the vampire scrambled to get his mouth back over the rampant fountain. Stiles’s boot abruptly sank into the
side of his skull and tore him from her. The creature recovered quickly, but received a second blow for its trouble, this one a side kick to the sternum that nearly knocked it through the only window in the hall. Stiles’s shotgun rectified the matter, blasting the fiend through in a shower of tinkling glass.

  Charlie brushed past him and went straight for the door, which was standing wide open. Facing it was Uncle Jim’s wheelchair, and perched on top of him was an older female in a slip that let ample amounts of white flesh peak out in all directions. Her face was buried in the old man’s neck, and the sucking sounds were enough to chill the deputy to the marrow. He raised the Mossberg to within inches of her side and fired. The silver buckshot knocked her from the wheelchair to the floor, where she lay convulsing on the threshold. Bean checked Uncle Jim. Saliva seeped from the corner of his mouth, and his eyes were glazed and unseeing. The attack itself had not killed him, but the resulting coronary had.

  Bean kicked the dying vampire out onto the porch and pulled the door shut, but not before glimpsing the scene outside. There were three or four more coming across the front lawn, their faces lit with rapacious hunger. But that wasn’t what caught his attention. There were more figures coming up Moffit Trail, barely silhouetted against the few lights of the town. Charlie’s jaw dropped. There was a horde of them, at least twenty, maybe more.

  Y’all come on in.

  Every one of you.

  “Christ,” he muttered. “Stiles! They’re coming!”

  “Who’s coming?” asked Hubert Ranall as Bean hurried back across the entry hall. The lanky black man was leaning over the shocked and muttering Mrs. Atchison while Jessie Shively tried to stem the flow of blood from the landlady’s throat. Ida Moore was just coming through the parlor door on her walker, nervously fingering the small crucifix from her housecoat pocket. Hubert was persistent. “Deputy, who is this guy?” he motioned to Stiles. “What the hell is going on here?”