A Coldness in the Blood (The Dracula Series)

by Fred Saberhagen

  But this strange oral burden had its drawbacks too. It aggravated his desperate need for air. It jarred and scraped against his teeth. The chill of it was so intense it almost burnt his tongue and the inside of his cheeks, yet there was some overwhelming reason why he must not spit it out.

  The air that seared his panting lungs was very hot and dry. The memory of what it had felt like to be terribly afraid, back in the years of the vampire’s own breathing boyhood, was suddenly keen and clear.

  Here loomed another wall, threateningly high, blocking his way, and he leaped for his life, clawing desperately with both hands to get a grip on the wall’s top. Shooting a quick glance over his shoulder as he straddled the barrier, he saw, as his borrowed self had both feared and expected, that a small group of brown-skinned men ran behind him in fanatical pursuit. They too were clad scantily in white, and they waved an assortment of edged weapons and uttered savage outcries.

  The pursuers vanished from the climber’s view as he dropped into a courtyard on the wall’s far side. In three directions loomed darkly magnificent doorways, each presenting an unknown choice. He immediately chose one of these—on what basis Maule could not have said—and darted into its shelter.

  Three or four steps into shadow, he had to pause to let his eyes recover from the glaring sun. The hard, mysterious burden in his mouth still interfered with his breathing, yet he dared not spit it out. His gasping filled his lungs with strong smells, bitter and ominous, of decay and chemicals.

  In a moment his eyes had begun adapting to the change, enough to let him see where he was going. A long room, low and narrow, stretched before him, and he went running through it toward a brilliant blur of sunlight at the far end. But somewhere near the halfway point, Maule’s dream-body came to an abrupt stop. Now he had noticed that a single shelf of dark stone was built into the walls on either side of him, at about shoulder height.

  And each of these two shelves held three little white statues, lined up in a straight row. The plaster of which they were formed still glistened wet, fresh from some kind of molding process, so it seemed evident they had been set out in this shaded place to dry. The pale and slender figures were practically identical, no more than about a foot high, and each looked very much like the statue Maule had just seen and handled in waking life.

  ~ 2 ~

  An alarm was sounding stridently, not in any of the rooms of Maule’s high condominium but in the hypnotically darkened caverns of his mind. What he had just experienced had been no natural vampire-sleep, no routine daytime trance transposed into the evening. A dreaming trance, a near-oblivion not far from the true death, had been imposed upon him by someone—or something—that was no friend of Matthew Maule.

  He had been overcome by some form of hypnosis, inflicted on him with fiendish stealth, devilish power and skill. The attack had taken him totally by surprise but, now that it had happened, it was all too easy to believe. He knew that when he could be caught unawares, his susceptibility to such a mesmeric assault was, if anything, greater than that of the average breathing man.

  Slowly the mercilessly effective grip that held Maule’s mind prisoner was being loosened. He could tell that soon he would be free. Evidently, whatever power had forced him into temporary mental bondage did not desire his destruction. To that nameless power Vlad Tepes, Prince Dracula, was no enemy—but only because it did not consider him important enough to be awarded that status. Instead, he and the defenses of his apartment were only a curiosity, deserving no more than a brief and casual inspection before being violated and cast aside.

  He thought it had invaded his house for reasons having nothing directly to do with him. Its business had been with the people and objects newly installed in his third bedroom. Now Maule remembered the crashing noise, the shouting that had not been part of any dream.

  Meanwhile, he could take some comfort in having escaped the unreal predicament of the dream. Men with knives and swords were not really chasing him through the dry heat of some ancient city. But even as that scene dissolved, Maule realized that what he discovered on waking might be worse.

  He was no longer running for his life beneath a blinding sun, scrambling through stifling, cavelike buildings. In truth he was still sitting in the twenty-first-century air-conditioning of his familiar apartment high above Michigan Avenue. But his foreboding had been correct: plenty of trouble, all too real, waited to greet him on his waking.

  An unaccustomed stiffness had seized the vampire’s body. Something was indeed terribly wrong. With a groan he sat up straight in his chair. It was very late at night—or early in the morning. His wristwatch and the small clock in the corner of his computer screen agreed that the time was just three-thirty. At this time of year, that meant that the hours of darkness were swiftly running out. One lamp was still turned on in his large living room. Two screens still glowed, one now showing a television test pattern, the other displaying a computer screen saver.

  Soon the merciless dawn would be here to further sap his energy. It was sickening to realize that he had lain in his chair for something like six hours as helpless as a baby, while his home, what Maule had thought was a practically impregnable stronghold, was violated. The sense of ruthless, callous encroachment was very strong.

  As soon as Maule’s eyes were fully open he turned them on Andy Keogh. The young man was still slumped in his chair, in almost the same uncomfortable-looking position as before, but now his eyes were closed and his arms hung loosely at his sides. Andy’s chest rose and fell as if in normal breathing sleep, and he showed no obvious sign of injury. But Maule was sure that all was not entirely well with Andy Keogh.

  The vampire struggled to his feet, muscles stiff, body swaying dizzily, trying to free himself by sheer willpower from the lingering effects of unnatural trance. Lurching to the young man’s side, Maule bent over him, shaking him to no avail. “Andy? Andy!”

  Still no response; but, thank God, the basic signs of life seemed almost normal.

  Now Maule straightened fully—it cost him a mighty effort. He took a staggering step or two, almost losing his balance. He was sure that at sunset his front door had been tightly closed and manifoldly locked, as usual. But now he could see it standing ajar, the city dweller’s usual paraphernalia of extra bolts and chains projecting in air or dangling uselessly. Someone had neatly unlocked and unbolted all the fastenings and then had left the door in that condition. Damn Dickon! He must have opened it from the inside, and fled in a blind panic.

  Having himself had intimate experience of the intruder, Maule could hardly blame the timid one.

  Or could it possibly have been the stranger, Tamarack, who left the door in that condition? Dickon in ordinary circumstances would never have dared do such a thing; but Dickon, confronted with the same intruder who had taken Maule by surprise and overcome him, might have done almost anything at all.

  Having staggered to his front door, Maule stood there, clinging to the jamb to keep from falling, trying to marshal his confused thoughts. He took a quick look out into the public hallway. At this ungodly and vampirish hour the passage was deserted, and he could hear no sounds of movement anywhere, no elevator hum or feet on stairs.

  Closing the front door solidly and shooting one simple bolt to hold it shut, he went reeling and stumbling back across his living room, to the wall where the wooden spears hung in the form of a diagonal cross. He snatched one from its brackets, and with this weapon in hand went down his apartment’s interior hallway to the end, where the door of the third bedroom was also standing open.

  Evidently it was not Mr. Tamarack who had forgotten to close the front door on his way out. For only his spirit had departed. Tamarack’s body was sprawled on the floor, and it needed no careful look to be sure that he was dead. The ugly wounds had been inflicted by no ordinary weapon, and strongly suggested the tearing of claws rather than the carving of a blade. Involuntarily Maule looked at his own fingernails, at the moment very human in appearance, to make sure t
hey were clean. There were no great pools of blood, but some had been spattered around the room, on walls and furniture and carpeting. The maculations were sheer carrion, hours dried and already decaying, red-brownish scum that aroused not hunger but nausea, like rotten food to a breather.

  As Maule had expected, Dickon was nowhere to be seen. The baggage from the elder vampire’s laundry bag had been scattered. Some things, the spare shirts and aspirin tablets, along with the bag itself, were now lying on the floor. The little white statue had been torn out of its plastic wrap and smashed to powder and small fragments, which lay scattered mostly over the bed. Mingled with fragments of ivory-colored plaster was a small mass of dark and crumbly stuff that seemed to have been somehow encased inside the plaster shell.

  A New Testament quotation regarding whited sepulchers ran through Maule’s mind, but at the moment it was of no help. He saw that the little painted panel of thin wood had also been torn out of its wrappings, but was not damaged. It too remained on the bed, but was now standing on edge, propped against the headboard.

  A swift inspection proved that no one, no human being, god, or monster, was hiding in the closet, or under the bed.

  Maule’s dizziness persisted, and he swayed on his feet. Mammalian blood. He badly needed fresh blood, to strengthen him.

  On his way to the kitchen he detoured to make another quick check on Andy’s condition; there seemed to be no change.

  The freezer offered Maule what he needed, in the form of raw young beef liver; the microwave swiftly brought it to a palatable temperature. Leaning over the stainless steel sink he sucked out liquid nourishment, fastidiously using a paper towel to dab small blood spots from his lips.

  Returning strength, increasing clarity of thought, brought no relief of mental pain, but only growing rage. Now he thought he could understand how the victim of a rape must feel. Murder and robbery had been committed, and right here in his own home. His territory, his castle in this later age, had been savagely, ruthlessly defiled.

  How dare they—how dare anyone—lay hands on, let alone murder, a visitor Vlad Drakulya had admitted under his protection?

  Could Dickon have been the killer, after all? No, no, surely not. Any vampire would have the physical strength to mangle a breather, but the cowardly one would never in a million years have dared to play a trick like that on Maule. Besides, Dickon’s faults did not include a tendency to sudden violence.

  Now he, Vlad Drakulya, was again in deep trouble, and without quite realizing just how he had got there. It was a situation in which he had found himself in the past, more times than he liked to count. Certainly more often than the laws of probability ought to allow, even in a lifetime of more than five hundred years. It was a familiar but discouraging problem, all the more discouraging for being so familiar. Over the last century he had begun to hope that he might someday succeed in avoiding this kind of thing.

  Stop and think. How had the intruder, or intruders, entered? If nosferatu, then someone inside the apartment, inside Maule’s home, must have invited them to come in.

  Dickon? Dickon was going to have to answer many questions.

  At last feeling himself fully awake, Maule, still in the kitchen where Andy could not possibly see him, endeavored to change his body into a nonhuman shape. He was eager to sharpen his senses, to discover if any attacker might still be on the scene, lurking in some room he had not yet inspected.

  But on making the attempt to change, he discovered that he had been even more drastically affected than he had first thought. He found himself starting to change into something lizardlike, almost a giant serpent, rather than the inconspicuous bat he had been trying to become.

  Attempting to resume man-form, he succeeded with a great shudder of relief. Walking solidly on two legs, he quickly returned to the living room; he found Andy still in a daze in front of his two electronic screens, both still glowing with letters, numbers, jargon, and symbols almost meaningless to Maule. But now the youth’s eyes occasionally flickered open, as if he could still be studying the images on the screens before him. Perhaps he found amusement in whatever he thought he saw, for he began to gently giggle.

  Effortlessly Maule lifted the large young man from his chair and stretched him at full length on a sofa. Switching on more lights, he felt Andy’s relaxed limbs, checked his pulse, lifted an eyelid to peer as nearly as possible into his brain. Quickly he examined the youth’s neck, then loosened his clothing to look at other areas, for evidence of pinprick biting. To his great relief, he could find none.

  So, things might have been even worse.

  For all that he could tell right now, the sole purpose of the violent intrusion had been to dispose of Tamarack. Maule had no idea why anyone should want to do that. But it did not seem as strange as the only other reason that suggested itself: that the intruder’s goal had been merely to shatter a small plaster statue, exposing the dark rubbish inside.

  Maule spent the next minute in a methodically thorough search of his apartment, which turned up no more surprises. No further trace of any intruder, nor any sign at all of Dickon.

  When I get my hands on him, thought Maule, he may wish that he had stayed in the burning building in Old Town.

  But the thought had no real urgency behind it. In his heart he realized that it was pointless to blame Dickon, who after all had tried, at least halfheartedly, to warn his host. Instead he must inescapably blame himself, for negligence and carelessness.

  And when he had discovered the identity of the intruder, as he eventually would—then judgment, the assignment of blame, would take on hard substance.

  The next step was grimly distasteful, but duty and honor alike forbade him to delay it any longer. After considering and rejecting one or two more exotic methods of communication, Maule reached for the phone.

  No need to look up the number he needed, for he had used it recently, only a few days ago. That was when he had made what now seemed an ill-starred decision, to begin a serious study of the Internet and related matters, and had started looking for a tutor. What more logical than that he should turn for guidance to the breathing folk he knew best in this region of the world? Maule’s hand slowed as he pressed buttons. He would have to explain to Andy’s father—or worse, to his mother—what had happened to their son here in Maule’s domain, when the tornado of murderous force, part occult and part physical, swept through.

  “Yeah.” The answering voice was sleepy but coherent, that of a man not entirely unused to being awakened at all hours by the telephone. No doubt that attitude was a residual benefit of years spent on the Chicago police force. Maule silently offered thanks that it was Joe who had answered and not Kate.

  “Joseph, it is I. Your Uncle Matthew.” A trace of irony in the last words.

  He could hear Joe Keogh breathing in his distant house, Joseph needing the space of a breath or two to pull himself together. Then he was ready for business. “What’s going on?”

  “I regret the necessity of waking you at this hour. Andy, your son, is here in my apartment. He has not been harmed, as far as I can tell, at least not seriously, and at the moment is peacefully asleep. But—there have been certain strange events. You had better come, with all deliberate haste. When you are here we will talk.”

  There was hesitation at the other end, but only briefly, as several natural questions were framed and then postponed. Then Joe Keogh repeated: “Strange events.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Your condo on Michigan Avenue.”

  “That is correct.”

  “All right. I’m on my way.”

  “Good.” Then Maule added, as an afterthought: “Arrange for John to come as well, if that is feasible.” Joe’s brother-in-law, John Southerland, had also served in the past as a capable and knowing ally.

  Having made all the speed he reasonably could to get here from his suburban home, Joe arrived at Maule’s apartment about daybreak, which came very early in the morning at this time of year.

&
nbsp; Joe Keogh hadn’t smoked for more than twenty years, but there were moments when he still felt the urge, and on entering Maule’s building from its underground garage he experienced one of them. The place held frightening memories.

  Joe was fifty now, but he looked somewhat younger, sandy hair turned half-gray, cut short over a tough-looking face. Eyeglasses added a scholarly touch. Of average size, and sparely muscular, so far resisting the tendency to put on weight, he was casually dressed today, tieless, his lightweight sport coat worn unbuttoned. He looked respectable and inconspicuous, as was appropriate for the head of a small but successful company specializing in the more unusual kinds of private investigation.

  Maule had just finished a routine closing of all the drapes, against the burning of the day’s new sun outside, when the doorchime sounded. His last squint out at the fast-brightening world showed him a lone canoeist, starting downstream, heading inland from the locked junction of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. It was unlikely but possible that the voyager was commencing a voyage to unknown lands, down the Mississippi as far as the Gulf of Mexico.

  Something rippled in the water, not far from the canoe. Since the river’s restoration to good health, only a few years ago, there might be bigger fish in it than anyone imagined.

  When Maule answered the door he was still gripping a wooden spear in his hand. He used it to beckon his visitor inside, then in the next moment turned, and in a spasm of impotent anger, flung the weapon like a harpoon at the wall across the room, where it stuck quivering with the brutal force of impact. “Violated! Like some helpless maiden!”

  Before trying to come up with a reply to that, Joe took two steps inside the apartment and stopped, visibly relieved at the sight of Andy sleeping peacefully.

  In a calmer voice, Maule said: “My home was invaded last night—by exactly what, or who, I am not yet sure—and we were both put to sleep. Another who was here fared worse.”