A Coldness in the Blood (The Dracula Series)

by Fred Saberhagen

  In a minute the two of them were back in the third bedroom, where Joe photographed the panel while it remained propped against the head of the bed.

  There remained the question of the significance of the shattered statue.

  “Dickon told me it was very valuable, important in his work. But he would not or could not tell me how.”

  “If it was worth a lot, why smash it? Sheer vandalism?”

  “Or perhaps to get at something inside. It was hollow, as we can see, and contained a dark organic substance, which must be as old as the statue itself. But very little of that material could have been taken.”

  Joe dutifully snapped a couple of pictures of a few handfuls of dust and broken plaster.

  When he had done so, Maule pointed out a detail that was just visible when keen eyes looked carefully. In the dark debris that had spilled from inside the statue, there were bits of what looked like narrow cloth tape, suggesting ancient bandages.

  Joe took what seemed a long time, looking, then snapped another close-up. “Know what this suggests to me? Some kind of mummy wrappings. It couldn’t have been the body of an infant, could it?”

  Maule shook his head. “The statue was too thin. No human infant, I think, nor even a late-term fetus, could have been squeezed inside. But I believe small animals were sometimes mummified in Egypt. Perhaps this was a snake? Or …”

  “I can show these pictures to my contact at the Field.” Joe knelt beside the mess and from somewhere in his pockets produced a tweezers and an envelope. “And maybe I can get him to look at a sample of this tape, or whatever the hell it is. Also I can ask if they’re missing any little white statues.”

  When the tape sample had been secured, the two men turned their attention to the murder victim. There would be no need of forensic science to determine the cause of Tamarack’s death.

  Looks like the work of a strong vampire in a destructive mode, thought Joe. But he didn’t see any need to make that comment aloud.

  “Want a picture of him?” he asked. Maule shook his head.

  Maule now made his first close examination of the corpse. There were no rings or other jewelry on Tamarack’s hands or head or neck, no evidence of pinprick biting in any of the traditional vampire places—although of course such traces on the head and neck might have been obliterated by the greater damage.

  A quick, efficient search of Tamarack’s pockets produced an assortment of odds and ends, entirely unremarkable. These included about fifty dollars in cash, and a simple keychain, one of whose keys bore the symbol of a prominent automotive manufacturer. Another pocket held a parking ticket issued by the machine in the garage beneath Maule’s building.

  Maule separated the automobile key. “Our next step should probably be to examine this vehicle.”

  Leaving John to keep Andy occupied and out of trouble, Maule and Joe Keogh set out for the garage. When they had the elevator to themselves, going down, Maule asked: “Is there something wrong, Joseph?”

  “Not really.” But still Keogh kept looking around him, involuntarily, nervously, at the door and the three enclosing walls. Just coming back to this building, riding again in these harmless elevators, brought back memories of terror now five years old, and made him edgy.

  Well, they had won that battle five years ago, Maule and his breathing family working together, and they would win this one. But Joe still had to make an effort to concentrate on the current problem. “Did he tell you what model of car or truck they came in? There must be about a hundred vehicles parked down there.”

  Maule’s thumb stroked the key. “Probably more than a hundred. But I will find it, if it is still there.”

  The garage was a busy place now, in the early morning rush hour. Maule and Keogh, two casually dressed reverse commuters getting ready to carpool to their jobs, moved along at a steady pace between the rows of numbered spaces.

  Now and then Maule slowed, looking intently at one vehicle or another. Eventually, for no decisive reason that Joe could see, the vampire came to a stop. “This one.”

  The car was older than most of those surrounding it, and like the great majority of them, it carried an Illinois license.

  Before Maule tried to use the key, he satisfied himself by sniffing, and by certain probings of an even more subtle nature, that no explosive devices had been installed. A bad experience in Arizona, some years ago, had made him very cautious in such matters.

  “Let us first look in the trunk.” After sniffing the air again, with a wolflike twitching of his neck, and listening carefully, Maule used the key.

  The trunk contained a few strange artifacts, as well as the usual miscellany to be expected in an old car. Maule recognized an alembic of clear glass, tying in with Dickon’s babble about alchemy. He had been half-expecting another white plaster statue, but in this he was disappointed. The glove compartment, and the various pockets in the car’s interior, held only common, mundane odds and ends.

  It was good that there was nothing out of the ordinary to draw attention to the undistinguished vehicle. Still, something would have to be done with it, and fairly soon.

  Maule pointed out that whoever disposed of Tamarack’s vehicle would have to take care to wipe his own fingerprints from it before abandoning it somewhere. “I suppose the possibility exists that it is stolen.”

  “I understand,” said Joe patiently. “I can try to get a make on the license. Some of my police connections are still open.”

  Maule closed his eyes briefly. Joe saw a pale hand knot into a fist. “Forgive me, I am—upset. The intrusion into my home …”

  “That’s all right. John or I can take care of the car. There’s something else that’ll be harder to dispose of, and I’m not sure of the best way to handle that.” Joe raised his eyes to the garage ceiling, as if he could see into a room some ninety stories above.

  “Leave that to me. If the body were elsewhere, I would be, as usual, a good citizen and anonymously pass word to the authorities.” Maule paused, shaking his head. “But because the wretch was murdered in my home—no. Good citizenship must wait. It has become a matter of personal honor.” His voice became harder, clearer. Joe winced slightly, recognizing that inflexible tone. “Best that you look after your son, until we are sure he suffers no lingering posthypnotic effects. I shall be the one to dispose of the vehicle, and the remains of its owner.”

  Joe wasn’t going to argue with either part of that.

  Going up in the elevator again, they had to share the small space with other passengers during the first portion of the journey. Traversing the higher floors, they were alone. Curiosity finally got the better of Joe Keogh, and he had to ask: “What will you do with … ?”

  “There is a certain place I know of—but you have been there too. Perhaps two hours’ drive out of the city.”

  Joe stopped to think. “Oh. Yeah.” He would never forget that place. A chunk of land too hilly for crops or even pasture, consisting largely of low wooded bluffs and ravines on the bank of the Sauk River, near the town of Frenchman’s Bend.

  Maule went on: “I have a slight acquaintance with the present owner.”

  Joe nodded. He had his suspicions about that owner’s identity, but he didn’t want to get into depths of craziness beyond where he already was. The subject made him feel inwardly dizzy, and he wasn’t going to think about it unless he had to. It must be some old and very tolerant friend. He wasn’t going to try to find out any more about him. Or her.

  Joe Keogh could vividly remember the strange battle that had reached its climax near Frenchman’s Bend—God, that was almost twenty years ago. After what he had seen then on the banks of the Sauk, he had no trouble at all believing that traces of grotesque enchantment still lingered there, like the residue of some vast chemical experiment, not necessarily harmful. For a few hours, some twenty years ago, that soil had been intensely cultivated by the greatest true magician in the world.

  A few minutes later, Keogh and Maule were walking Andy bet
ween them to the elevator. All the way down to the garage the kid kept commenting on the fact that he had never before crashed the way he did last night—at least never without a strenuous interlude of partying first.

  “But last night I didn’t even have a beer,” he complained for the second or third time. “I guess I just zonked out, huh?”

  Maule said: “I confess that much the same thing happened to me last night, also without benefit of alcohol.” He paused, then added: “I had a strange dream, sitting in my chair.”

  “Yeah?” Andy seemed to find that mildly interesting. “I didn’t dream anything.” Then he paused, frowning. “I did dream something … but I don’t remember it. Dad, how come you were here when I woke up? Did Uncle Matt call you because of me?”

  “Your father and I had some matters to discuss,” Maule said dismissively. He was thinking he had better wait before trying to extract more information from Andy. There remained the possibility of deep hypnotic probing, but that drastic treatment sometimes produced unwelcome side effects, and the vampire preferred to save it as a last resort.

  Andy seemed to be moving easily, talking almost normally as they made their way from the elevator through the garage.

  But not till he had a hand on the door of his father’s car did Andy suddenly recall why he had come to this building in the first place. He turned back. “Uncle Matt, are we going on with your project? About getting you a web site and all? It was getting really interesting, with all that neat new hardware.”

  “Yes, eventually of course I mean to go on. But for a few days I shall be too busy with other matters.”

  With Andy in the car and out of earshot, the men held a final low-voiced consultation on whether they should return him to his own north-side apartment, which he shared with two other university students, or to his parents’ home. Joe didn’t need long to conclude that the latter seemed a safer bet.

  “He comes home with me,” Joe decided. “Either way I’ll have to tell Kate what happened, and when she hears about it she’s going to murder us both.” Joe made a gesture to show that “us” meant the vampire and himself. “I’m the one who suggested …”

  “That your son should be my tutor and spend time in my apartment. Yes. Presumably Kate knows where you are now?”

  “Hell yes. When I dash out in the middle of the night—thank God I don’t very often any more—she knows where I’m going. That reminds me, I’d better call home, let her know Andy’s basically all right. As far as we can tell.” He felt at his belt for his cell phone, giving Maule a brief glimpse of the shoulder holster under the open sport coat. Maule had no doubt that today Joe’s revolver was loaded with wooden bullets, the only kind effective against the nosferatu.

  Maule said: “Indeed, I share your apprehension regarding Kate’s reaction.” He looked morose, then brightened slightly. “Fortunately your son’s condition was never serious, and is steadily improving.”

  “You think so?” Joe poked at his phone, held it to his ear, and frowned. “Busy. I’ll try again in a few minutes.”

  “There are certain subtle signs. And it is common enough for a youth of Andy’s age to appear slightly dazed, even—or especially—to those who know him best.”

  “I hope you’re right. You probably are.” But Joe sounded not entirely convinced.

  The car doors were closed and the engine started when Maule had a last-minute thought, and tapped on a window. Joe rolled it down.

  But it was Andy who got Maule’s question.

  “You are a student at the university of Thomas More.”

  “On summer break right now, but yeah.”

  “Was not that institution at one time deeply engaged in studies of ancient Egypt?”

  “Ancient Egypt?” Again Andy sounded a little anxious, as if wondering whether he might again have missed whole paragraphs of conversation.

  “Yes. I should very much like to talk to someone having expertise in such matters. As soon as possible. But do not give anyone the impression of an emergency.”

  Even as Maule spoke, a new memory returned to him, and he looked at Joe. “Did I tell you that last night I heard Dickon mention someone named Flamel, describing him as his partner in an ambitious project? An unusual name, I think.”

  Joe frowned. “Eff-el-ay-em-ee-el?”

  “That sounds likely. I have no certain knowledge of the spelling. But some decades ago, in Europe, I had a breathing friend who bore that name. He might still be alive. If you can come up with any information—?”

  Keogh nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I’ll try to find out,” Andy added. “How much TMU was into the Egypt thing. Maybe they still are,” he added slowly. “But I don’t know.”

  “I would appreciate your doing so.”

  By the time Joe’s car had pulled up and out of the spacious underground garage, Wednesday morning’s rush hour was over.

  It was very inefficient, this repeated riding up and down, but this morning Maule did not see how it could be avoided. Ascending once more to his apartment, he meditated on the subject of mummified small animals, and pondered why certain folk among the ancients, presumably Egyptians, might have sealed them into plaster statues. His meditations made very little progress.

  Nor had he yet been able to think of any reason why a small, mummified creature should provoke murder, but it certainly suggested a connection with ancient Egypt—and the fact that the scene in Maule’s own visionary dream had been set in some hot, dry land was too apposite to be ignored.

  “It would be folly to consider that a mere coincidence,” he said to himself aloud. The woman with whom he was sharing the elevator at the moment looked at him nervously, and he gave her a reassuring smile.

  Back in his apartment, entering the ravaged spare room, he noted with approval that John Southerland had already made a good start on the job of cleaning up. The young man had located the utility closet and laundry tub, and had fitted himself with an apron and a pair of rubber gloves, as well as a disposable paper mask of the type used by breathers to filter out particles of sanded paint and sawdust.

  Now John was armed with several kinds of detergent, a pail and scrub-brush, which he was applying energetically to walls and furniture. The defiled spots on the carpet had been sprayed with cleansing foam. The bed had been stripped of all its covers, and in the utility room at the far end of the apartment a washing machine could be heard churning through its cycle.

  Of course the major piece of debris had yet to be removed; Maule had reserved that detail for himself. Actually he would have preferred to do the entire cleanup with his own hands, and would have done so had he the time. His mental image of himself was much more a soldier than an aristocrat, and menial tasks were inescapably part of the life of any soldier in the field.

  Besides, he was quite accustomed to performing for himself the humble chores of daily life. One of the drawbacks of vampire life down through the ages was the extreme difficulty of obtaining and keeping reliable household help. Over the past five hundred years, Maule’s strong, pale hands had scrubbed an incredible number of floors, and he could have written a monograph on the best techniques to use in cleaning everything from ancient stone to twenty-first-century imitation wood. Nor was scrubbing floors the meanest task he had performed.

  Joe Keogh, now well along in the process of driving his son home, was just turning off his cell phone after a brief and (he hoped) reassuring talk with Kate.

  He turned to glance at Andy, riding in the passenger seat beside him. “Just thought I’d let your mother know you look okay,” Joe told him.

  “Uh-huh.” Andy still didn’t seem totally connected with his surroundings.

  Now Joe mentally reviewed the horrible situation in Maule’s building. Evidently you had to expect this kind of thing from time to time, if you were on close terms with a vampire. Joe had realized long ago that he was never going to completely understand the old friend of the family and his ways—nor would he ever
want to. Joe was convinced that life would be easier and everyone would be better off if certain facts just never came to light—for example, the real name of the man whom he had had known first as Dr. Emile Corday.

  Once more Joe looked sideways at Andy. “How you doing, kid?”

  “Fine.” But Andy’s eyes still looked a little glazed, watching scenery glide by as the highway carried them toward their suburb. So far he hadn’t commented on the evident fact that he was being driven home, not back to his own apartment.

  Joe said: “Some day you and I have to have a talk about Uncle Matt. You know he’s not a—a blood relation.”

  Andy looked at him, and his voice took on the tone of a child being patient with a parent. “Yes, I know that, Dad. I’ve known that for a long time.”

  “But—in some ways, he’s closer to us than some of our blood relations are.”

  “Yeah.” It was a noncommittal acknowledgment.

  Having got that far, Joe stalled. Obviously now was not the time to explain anything complicated to his son. And an ancient proverb, popping up from somewhere, kept running through his mind: A secret that is known by three, soon will not a secret be. But he was going to argue with the proverb. The fact was that more than three in the family already knew the great secret of Matthew Maule: Joe himself, John, Kate, Joe’s absent sister Judy. And of course Angie, John’s wife, knew the facts as well as anyone—her introduction to the family, coinciding with the gruesome affair of Valentine Kaiser, had been spectacular indeed.

  Joe could foresee the kind of conversation he would have with his kids, Andy and his sister Nell, when the time arrived for him to try to tell them about the reality of vampires, and just how close to home the subject came. It wasn’t a discussion Joe looked forward to. In a way, it was probably going to be bizarrely like explaining about Santa Claus, or sex—though when those subjects had come up, he had soon discovered that the kids already knew the fundamentals almost as well as he did. That wouldn’t happen in this case; Uncle Matt had a reality that Santa Claus was never going to achieve.