Ardeth wrapped her arms around her knees and stared out into the darkness. Thinking seemed, momentarily, to blot out her painful, almost physical awareness of the creature in the cell beside her. Maybe it would be her defence, her refuge after all. Maybe it would shield her now, protect her from the embodied death so close to her.
She started with Roias. Surely not all the films produced here were snuff films. Most must be legitimate pornographic films, available by mail, in video stores and by the secret chain of VCR owners that served as the conduit for such things.
She couldn’t believe that there was any direct link between Roias and Armitage. But why would men who made porno movies want to kidnap her? It was clear that they had been pursuing her, otherwise how would they have known her name? In fact, kidnapping her had been an afterthought. They had obviously intended to kill her, just as they had killed “the other guy.” She shuddered suddenly, remembering her flight across the hillside, the jagged knife’s cold kiss against her skin. But if Roias and Wilkens didn’t have any reason to kill her, perhaps someone else did. Someone who had hired them to do it because that was what they were good at, that was what they did.
Assuming her suspicions about their deaths were correct, why had Tony and Conrad been killed? The obvious answer was that they knew something they weren’t supposed to. But what on earth would either of them know about porno films? Unless it didn’t have anything to do with pornography at all—but with something else, some other secret they knew. Or that they could know. And there had to be some connection between the deaths and her own predicament—or else how had Roias and Wilkens known her name? That thought led her straight back to the only thing that linked her, Tony and Conrad beyond their status as graduate students—their work for Armitage.
Still, it seemed dangerous to her, to hire three people and then kill or kidnap them. Surely the police would be made suspicious by the sudden propensity of history grad students for misadventure, murder and disappearance. If Armitage had something to hide, surely it would have made more sense to hire only one person to do all the research and then risk only one murder.
Unless, she thought suddenly, the killings had not been anticipated. Perhaps their original plan had been to simply let them collect their fees and gradually forget about the essentially tedious research work they had done. Then something had happened—something that could make the knowledge they had dangerous to the company.
Ardeth shifted on the cot, her eyes still focused, unseeing on the bars. She was close, the scent of her quarry making her heart pound.
If she was right, then the research she, Conrad and Tony had done was connected somehow, despite appearances. If she could find that link, then the puzzle would finally take shape in her mind. But what possible link could there be between sixteenth-century magician-scientists, a Russian dynasty and the ownership of buildings in nineteenth-century Toronto?
One subject was medieval, one continuous and one relatively modern. Two were European, one about North America. Ardeth ran the comparisons through her mind carefully. Two were about people, or families, one was about buildings. No, she corrected herself slowly, not about buildings but about the people who owned them. Still, there had been more than forty-five names on the list she had drawn up, forty-five owners of more than twenty-five buildings. Most of those people were long dead, and many of the buildings long demolished.
But only one of those buildings had recently been bought by a nameless company. Only one of those buildings had burned down, with three men inside. Only one building had long ago been owned by a man whose name tied him to Conrad’s research.
When the answer hit her, she sat up straight and held her breath. She rolled her solution around in her mind for a moment, prodding it for defects, weaknesses. It held, solid and undeniable. The reason for the research, the burning and the signing of death warrants for them all. The name Armitage had wanted—that of a long-forgotten Russian wool merchant who had vanished from the city one hundred years earlier, leaving behind an empty, unclaimed warehouse on River Street.
Carefully, she looked over at the vampire. “You’re Rozokov. Dimitri Rozokov.”
His head came up slowly, like a creature wakened from sleep. In the faint light, she could not see his eyes, only the narrow line of his profile beneath the cindered silk of his hair. “You are, aren’t you?” She turned on her cot to face him, elation suddenly wiping away fear.
“Yes.” His voice was faint, a rusty scrape that hurt her own throat with its dryness. “I am Rozokov.”
“They found you, in the warehouse. Then they burnt it to hide where you’d been.” There was no reply, only the slow susurration of his breathing. “What happened there . . . in the warehouse?”
“I killed one,” Rozokov said slowly, as if remembering something that had happened centuries before. “I woke up . . . so hungry . . . there were men there and I killed one. The others had a machine . . . the pain.” His head bent suddenly, shoulders shuddering beneath an unseen lash.
“Who found you? Was it Roias?” she asked, but he was gone again, eyes blank, features closed as carved marble. She said his name once more, but he did not stir. Before she turned away, she said, softly, “My name is Ardeth,” because it suddenly mattered that he should know.
Chapter 7
The second day was, if anything, longer than the first. Ardeth paced restlessly across her cell. Movement helped to keep her calm, if only in the illusion of activity. It also kept her warm; the cellar’s chill dampness seemed to have seeped into her bones.
Two days. It seemed like an eternity to her, an endless age of darkness and cold, punctuated only by the bright heat of fear. But outside the cell, two days was nothing. It was only Monday. She had no classes on Monday, no place she could be missed from, and no one to know she was gone from the safety of her routine. How many more days until someone missed her . . . and how long after that till they did anything about it?
How long until they make you put your arm through the bars again? the cruel voice in the back of her mind asked. She turned to push away that thought and failed. She stopped, closed her eyes against the waves of panic surging up through her mind, and took a deep, shuddering breath. The moment of terror passed, as they all did, unsustainable in the face of the endless hours, and she resumed her pacing.
The vampire (Rozokov, she reminded herself) was sleeping, face to the wall. Unconsciously, she paused in her restless movement to look at him. The intellectual elation she had felt at the discovery of his identity had worn off somewhat, blunted by his steadfast withdrawal from the world for the remainder of the previous night. So you know his name, so what? the cynical voice in her mind mocked. The two of you can now exchange pleasantries after he drinks your blood. It matters, she told herself resolutely. It makes a difference. For one thing, it was something Roias did not appear to know—or want her to know.
She settled back on her cot and retrieved an apple from the breakfast tray Wilkens had brought. She had finally worked up the nerve to talk to him. Now that, she reflected, had been an exercise in futility. She had asked the time, to which he had growled, “Don’t see what difference it makes to you.” There had been no response she could give to that, so she had watched in silence as he climbed the stairs back up into the light.
Later in the afternoon, another man had come down the stairs. He was younger than Roias and Wilkens, barely out of his teens, and had an awkward nervousness about him. His long brown hair and faded heavy metal band T-shirt made him look like one of the suburban high-school kids who hung out on Yonge Street in search of big-city excitement. The band’s leering skeletal mascot grinned across his chest at Ardeth.
He had ducked under the staircase and begun to hunt through the equipment stored there. He had been careful not to look at the vampire, but, watching him, Ardeth caught his curiously guilty glances at her. When he had at last emerged with a tangled handful of cables and started up the stai
rs towards the door, she thought that she could hear barely restrained relief in his steps. She had felt absurdly comforted to discover that someone else was afraid of the vampire.
There was a rustling sound from the next cell, as the vampire stirred, began to wake. At least, that’s what all the books and movies said; vampires can only rise after sundown. Of course, the same books and movies also said that vampires slept in coffins, feared crosses and garlic, and could turn themselves into bats or mist. The first and last were obviously myths; Rozokov had no coffin and if he were capable of transforming, he would undoubtedly have done so and escaped. She doubted somehow that crosses and garlic would have much effect.
She watched surreptitiously as he rose and walked to the length of the chain. He stared up at the door for a moment, then turned to pace towards her cell. Ardeth fought the impulse to shrink back against the wall. Instead, she sat very still and watched him.
He stared at her for a moment with pale, puzzled eyes. His gaze was devoid of the red hunger she feared. Talk to him, she thought. If you can make him talk to you, at the very least it’ll pass the time down here a lot faster. “Rozokov,” she said quietly, unable to think of anything else. Something moved under the gaze, flickering like a fish beneath the ice of a frozen river. She groped desperately for something to say, any line she could cast to draw that shadow of awareness to the surface. Something about him . . . something that would make him remember . . . Then she heard Tony’s voice, telling her more than she wanted to know about Renaissance magician-scientists. She had been more interested in the coincidence of their sponsorship than the details of his subject, but had been momentarily intrigued by the fact that magic and science were so intermingled in the past he studied, and so separate in the one she did. “Were you an astronomer?”
The lines around his face deepened as he frowned. “I . . .” The word was no more than a whisper, the faintest of tugs on the line she had thrown.
“Is that what you were, long ago? A scientist? A magician?” Ardeth persisted, keeping her voice low. She was suddenly aware of the strength of the hands hanging loose at his sides, remembering the mad, feral hunger that had burned in him two nights earlier. She felt her leg cramping beneath her and shifted a little to ease it.
The movement seemed to distract the vampire, whose gaze slipped from her face to her throat. She fought the urge to put her hands up to protect herself from his eyes. The hunger was returning, like a distant fire in the grey depths of his gaze.
Ardeth froze, torn between the desire to maintain the fragile link between them and her fear of his terrible, alien need. “Did you discover the secrets of the stars? Did you ever change lead into gold?” she asked. The questions drew his eyes back from the pulse in her throat and she struggled to identify the emotion lying beneath the icy gaze.
“No.” As he turned away, she heard the echoes of his eyes’ emotion in his voice and knew that it was sorrow.
The clank of his chain as he began to pace signalled the end of the conversation.
The young one, whose name she didn’t know, brought dinner. He was nervous, glancing edgily at the vampire, who continued his restless pacing. Ardeth was surprised when, rather than handing her tray through the door, he sidled into her cell, keeping as far from the adjoining cage as his pride would allow. He locked the door behind him.
“Dinner,” he announced brusquely and set the tray down on the floor by her cot.
“Where’s Wilkens?” she asked casually, emboldened by his entry into the cell.
“Busy.”
“What’s your name?”
“Peterson.”
“Thanks for dinner, Peterson.” He shrugged uncertainly, backing away from her. He was at the door, sliding back the bolt, when Ardeth stood up. She still had no real idea of what was going on, and Peterson was the only one of her captors who had shown any inclination to talk to her. “Wait . . .” He paused watching her. “Could you just talk to me for a minute. It’s lonely down here with just him.” Jesus, girl, you are so transparent, Ardeth thought, but Peterson’s nervousness was melting into uneasy interest. His eyes flickered over her as if gauging possible threat and reward.
“All right, but don’t try anything,” he warned.
“What would I try?” Ardeth asked. “I just get lonely down here. It’s pretty creepy.”
“Yeah,” Peterson breathed, his eyes drifting almost unwillingly to the oblivious vampire.
“I guess he,” she gestured with her head to the vampire, “must be pretty valuable.”
Peterson drew breath to answer, then the sound of the upper door opening sent him scrambling back through the cell door. He was busy locking the padlock and Ardeth had retreated to the cot when Roias started down the stairs.
“Well, good evening, Ms. Alexander. Good evening, Your Highness.” He looked at the pacing vampire, who made another savage, tigerish circuit of the cage without glancing up. “I think he’s hungry. What do you think?”
Ardeth shook her head uneasily, dreading the feverish glitter in his eyes. Even Peterson had shrunk away from him, retreating into the shows pooling at the base of the stairs.
“Well, I think he’s hungry. And I think he’s gonna stay that way a while yet. I think he’s getting a bit too energetic in there. Maybe a dose of the old ultrasound would do him some good.” The pacing stopped, the clank of the chain dying to a rattle. “Oh you understand that well enough, don’t you?”
Roias’s bright, hectic smile matched his glittering eyes. He’s on something, Ardeth realized, some drug that crystallized all his sadistic impulses into diamond resolve. “Come here, bitch!” he snapped suddenly and she stumbled to her feet. “Come here.” Ardeth forced herself to walk across the cell to stand by the door. “Give me your hand.” Seizing her wrist, he jerked her savagely forward, slamming her into the bars.
When Roias took the knife from his pocket, she started to struggle involuntarily. He won’t cut me, she told herself desperately. My blood’s too valuable, he won’t, he won’t . . .
When he did, she barely felt it, the quick, light cut that drew a line of rubies across her fingers. “Oh, Your Highness,” Roias crooned as he held up her bleeding hand,
Ardeth watched Rozokov’s head turn slowly. His eyes sparked, reflecting the blood, and he swallowed convulsively. “Want some? Of course you do. But in this case, the pleasure’s all mine.” Ardeth gasped in surprise as Roias took her fingers into his mouth and sucked away the blood. The touch made her skin crawl, made her soul shrink in a way even the vampire’s feeding had not.
Rozokov watched helplessly and Ardeth saw the long fingers clench. Roias lifted his head and laughed, squeezing Ardeth’s hand to make the blood blossom forth again. Then he dropped her hand and gestured to the silent Peterson. “Bring the ultrasound.” Peterson started nervously and, when Roias’s head half-turned, scrambled under the stairs to drag out the machinery. The drug-bright eyes focused back on Ardeth. “Put your hand into the cell.”
She remembered the vampire’s almost incoherent murmur about “a machine” and pain and suddenly realized Roias’s intention. He was going to torture Rozokov and use her blood as the lure. “Go on!” Roias snapped and she moved slowly forward, aware of Rozokov’s eyes on her. She put her shaking hand through the bars. The chain on the vampire’s ankle would not prevent him from reaching her outstretched hand and Roias knew it.
“There it is, Your Highness. All the sweet blood you want. Who knows, I might let you drain her dry. Or I might turn on the ultrasound,” he gestured with the narrow, wand-like device in his hand.
Ardeth watched Rozokov’s eyes fasten on her hand. His tongue slid out across his lips. “Don’t,” she breathed helplessly, though she was not sure whether the plea was aimed at Roias or the vampire. She could see the yearning in every line of Rozokov’s gaunt body, in the fearful light in his eyes.
Finally he moved. It was only a step, a shuffle r
eally, but it was enough. Roias laughed and turned on the machine.
Rozokov screamed almost immediately, a wrenching, anguished howl that sent Ardeth staggering back from the bars to collapse on the floor. The vampire had fallen too, arms wrapped about his head, his face to the floor as if he sought to muffle his cries against the stone.
Ardeth willed herself not to scream in accompaniment but in the end, she was crying, her own hands over her ears to shut of the vampire’s agony.
Roias turned off the machine and Rozokov’s screams ended as suddenly as they had begun. In the silence, the only sound was Ardeth’s broken sobbing. “You feel sorry for him?” Roias inquired. “How touching. He’ll still kill you. Remember that.”
The cold words helped. She wiped her face and sat up, looking at Roias. I shouldn’t have cried, Ardeth thought. He mustn’t suspect I’ve talked to Rozokov, that I know who he is. She stumbled to her feet then to the edge of the cell.
“Don’t leave me down here please. Don’t leave me here. . . .” She was suddenly grateful for the tears she didn’t have to feign. Roias laughed and turned away, gesturing for Peterson to follow him up the stairs. “No, please, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me here with him!” Ardeth cried after the retreating backs until the final echoes of mocking laughter were cut off by the heavy slam of the upper door.
She felt her muscles fail her, relief crumpling her knees and leaving her to slide to the floor in the corner of the cell. She crouched there, shaking, while the echoes of screaming died in her ears. Roias was gone, gone without seeming to suspect that . . . That what? That he frightens you more than the monster in the next cell? That Rozokov may not be the mindless creature they’ve assumed? That she’d been trying, however clumsily, to get information from Peterson? Don’t let him come back, she prayed to the darkness. Let him find somewhere else to play out his sadistic urges.
The Night Inside Page 7