The Night Inside

by The Night Inside (epub)

  She turned on the headlights to negotiate the long, tree-roofed laneway. This could not have been the road Roias and Wilkens had driven on the endless trip to the asylum; it was too smooth. Her suspicion was confirmed when she reached the end of the drive. Looming before her were the iron gates, patched with rust, held closed by a chain and padlock. They were flanked with high stone walls.

  Ardeth cursed, and slammed the BMW into reverse, twisting to check the road in the tail-lights as she backed up. “You are going back?” Rozokov asked, as he turned in the seat to follow her gaze.

  “Actually, I was thinking of going through,” she replied, turning to him and catching the edge of her own manic grin in the rear-view mirror. She didn’t give him time to process but hit the accelerator and aimed the car at the centre of the gates, adrenaline surging up through her. It washed away the voice that whispered warnings in her head, trying to remind her that this kind of thing only worked in the movies.

  The car hit the gates at close to sixty miles per hour and while the force wasn’t enough to snap the gleaming chain, it was more than sufficient to break the rusted hinges. For a moment, Ardeth’s head was full of the sound of grinding metal, and the sight of black bars as they tumbled over the car. Then the BMW was free and she spun the wheel frantically to avoid the ditch.

  In a spray of gravel and dirt, she brought the car to a shuddering halt, stretched diagonally across the road. She took a deep breath and looked at her hands on the wheel. They were steady. Her heart was pounding, a quick tattoo that echoed up through her, but she realized with quickly fading surprise that it was with excitement, not fear. She had not been afraid. She let herself savour that realization for a moment, then looked over at Rozokov.

  He was sitting very still in the seat, one hand resting on the door handle. White was fading from his knuckles. “Well,” he said, after a moment. “That was quicker than going back.” He glanced at the gate hanging like a broken wing over the driveway. “We should put that back as best we can.”

  “All right.” Outside the car, Ardeth glanced at the front bumper and decided the dents were not too noticeable.

  “I gather this was not something for which these vehicles were precisely designed,” Rozokov observed carefully.

  “Probably not,” she conceded and felt a trace of amusement at his casual manner of confirming that his white knuckles had been justified.

  After a few moments of manoeuvring, they managed to realign the gate with the stone walls and prop it into a position that approximated its unwounded state. Ardeth stepped back and squinted at it critically for a moment. She guessed that traffic on this road was minimal, and limited mostly to locals. They probably no longer even looked at the gate; it was merely part of the scenery. Roias’s confederates had been trained to use only the back laneway. It might be weeks before anyone noticed the damage.

  Ardeth glanced back at the car. She supposed that they could get in and just start driving, trusting that she’d recognize some town or sign that would orient them back to the city. She looked up at the sky, regretting that she’d never bothered to take any courses in astronomy. She wasn’t even sure where the Big Dipper was any more.

  Rozokov followed her gaze and traced the discontent on her face back to its source. “That way is north,” he said, pointing back towards the asylum. “Is that of any use in solving your dilemma?”

  “Well, I still don’t know where we are, but if we go south sooner or later we’ll hit something I recognize. Even if it’s just the lake.”

  “You still wish to go back to the city, then?”

  “You don’t?” she questioned in return. “Don’t you want to find out who knows about you, and how much?” She paused, stepping closer to him. “Don’t you want to make them pay?” He shook his head slightly then took one last look at the sky.

  “Drive us south then, child,” he said, smiling, but even in the darkness she could see that it was fraying at the edges, “but try to avoid any more locked gates.”

  Ardeth willed herself to see the smile and not the sadness, then led the way back to the car.

  They drove in silence through the dark back roads. She started left, for no more reason than the car was pointed that way, then turned south on the first paved road she found. The BMW’s headlights marked the only movement on the landscape, and nearly the only light. The occasional porch light glowed faintly across the fields, and once they passed a house with all the windows bright, looking like an illuminated dollhouse set in the dark playground of the night.

  Gradually the signs of road names, distances and populations yielded one she could use: Toronto, 100 kilometres. She turned right onto a four-lane road, then caught an exit-ramp and gunned the BMW out onto a near-deserted highway. In the west, the sky glowed like a false dawn. “What is that?” Rozokov asked.

  “The city.” When the silence fell again, she could sense the great gap of years he faced, from a city lit with gaslights to a nuclear-powered sprawl whose lights were visible from space, banishing the purity of night.

  Shaken, she reached for the radio dial, filling the emptiness with a burst of static, then the clamor of a heavy-metal song. “I hope that is not what this era calls music,” Rozokov said, in only partially feigned horror, and she laughed.

  “Some people do. Usually long-haired, pimply-faced adolescent boys.” The description brought back memories of Peterson and his gloating death’s-head T-shirts. Ardeth spun the dials quickly, sliding through chatter, bass riffs and commercial jingles until she reached the relative comfort of Mozart. “Is that better?”

  He nodded, but turned his head to stare out the window, and the silence, dispelled, now seemed twice as heavy. The music ended somewhere in the suburbs and the announcer’s voice came on with the perfunctory 2 A.M. Newscast. Ardeth let the latest from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the House of Commons wash over her. A lifetime had passed for her it seemed, but only a few days in the world. Very little had changed.

  “Police continue to ask the public for help in locating Ardeth Alexander, reported missing Tuesday night. Anyone who may have seen the twenty-eight-year-old graduate student since last Thursday should contact police at 555-3636.”

  Not much of a eulogy. “A twenty-eight-year-old graduate student.” She wondered who had reported her missing. Carla? Sara? It hardly mattered. They must have no idea what had happened to her; they weren’t even sure when she had disappeared. She felt a distant twinge of bitterness at the memory of her grand and hopeless schemes of rescue. To think she had clung to those hopes of salvation, when her saviours did not even know she needed saving.

  Rozokov had returned his attention from the dark passage of trucks outside the window. “Ardeth,” he began and she shrugged, as if twitching off an unwanted hand on her shoulder.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m not missing.”

  “You can’t go home. You know that. Wherever you take us tonight, it cannot be home.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said, hands tight on the wheel. “Let them keep looking for Ardeth Alexander. Ardeth Alexander is dead.”

  “Long live Ardeth Alexander,” Rozokov said with a smile, but under the humour she could sense the edges of mockery. Or warning.

  “Long live Ardeth Alexander,” she echoed and then saw the turnoff to the Don Valley Parkway. The BMW slid across three empty lanes of highway and down the throat of the off-ramp.

  She found a place to stop just north of Bloor Street; the burnt shell of an abandoned brick factory shaded by trees and shielded from the road by a decade’s worth of unchecked undergrowth. She pulled up behind the rusting remains of some ancient machinery and shut off the engine. Over the tick of its cooling, she thought she could hear the faint hiss of the sparse traffic on the highway, and the fainter whisper of the river as it swirled its slow, muddy way to the lake.

  The car would be found sooner or later and traced to Greg. Could he ever be
connected to them? She looked at her hands, pale fingers resting on the leather steering wheel. “Fingerprints . . . we have to get rid of my fingerprints.”

  Rozokov nodded and hunted in his pockets, looking, she realized suddenly, for the cloth handkerchief that men always carried in his past. She was not surprised when he discovered only a tattered tissue secreted in the depths of his stolen clothing. Ardeth shrugged off her jacket, took one sleeve of her shirt and used teeth and nails to rip it off at the elbow. Carefully she rubbed the cloth across the steering wheel, turn signals, light switches and the clasp of her seat belt. When she left the car, she treated the door handles, locks and the edges of the window the same way.

  She pulled the jacket on and looked at Rozokov standing on the other side of the car. “Now what do we do?”

  “We must find some place to spend the day; it will be dawn in a few hours.”

  “What kind of place?”

  “An abandoned building, a tunnel. At the very least, some place deep in the trees, where no one goes.”

  “I don’t know what’s in this ravine.” She frowned, trying to remember what she had seen from the subway as it ran beneath the bridge to the south. “There are abandoned houses and stores farther down. If we start walking now, it won’t take long.”

  “Go then.” She looked at him sharply. “We cannot stay together.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would not be safe for you. You are right. This was not Roias’s scheme. Someone else has planned all this. They know of my existence but you . . . no doubt they believe you died a true death in the asylum. They will not be looking for you.”

  “If they’re still after you, then that’s all the more reason we should stay together. You don’t know this city any more. You don’t even know this century.” The words came out more cruelly than she had intended, sharpened by her fear.

  “I shall manage,” he replied drily. “I have some years’ experience with these things, if you recall.”

  “What about me?”

  “You shall manage as well. Only be careful. Do not go home; do not go any place where people might recognize you. No one must know that you still live.”

  “What if I won’t go? You can’t stop me from following you,” she pointed out.

  “But I can. You are very young, and you are my blood. I can force you—and I will, if I must.” His voice was hard and the grey eyes cold and remote. “We are solitary creatures. It does not do for us to forget that.”

  “So now that you’ve got what you wanted, you remember that again,” Ardeth said bitterly.

  “It was your choice. And I made you no promises.”

  “No.” There was a moment of silence, as if he waited for her to say more. She clenched her teeth to keep the words inside her. At last, he turned away and began to walk towards the trees.

  “Damn him,” she whispered. “Damn, damn, damn.” He had known all along he would leave her. You’ll see, you’ll see it’s not as easy as you think. You’ll wish I was there. She wondered if he could hear the venomous thoughts but the retreating figure did not stop. You’ll be sorry you left me.

  She suddenly remembered the stolen money in her pocket. For a moment, she contemplated keeping it all, taking a bitter pleasure in imagining Rozokov fumbling through the labyrinth of the modern world with no resources at all. Then she remembered the cold, unforgiving dungeon, the colder, unforgiving future she’d seen there, and the pleasure melted into pain.

  “Wait,” she called softly and ran towards him. He paused and turned, waiting as she caught up to him. “Roias’s money—take it.” She pushed the bills into his hands and he smoothed them out, staring curiously at the coloured bills with the face of a queen that he did not recognize.

  “What about you?” For a moment, she thought she heard regret in his voice.

  “I’ll get more.” Rozokov shook his head and carefully counted out five hundred dollars. It was the final severing and she protested, but at last took the bills and stuffed them back into her jacket pocket. He stepped away, passing into the dark edges of the wood. “Dmitri . . .” Her voice slid up from a whisper into a cry and caught in her throat.

  Nothing is forever, something whispered in her mind, so softly she was not sure whether it was her thought or his. Not even for vampires.

  “This will not be forever,” she said to the darkness. “You’ll see.”

  Shark Walk

  She’s hungry all the time

  —she do the Shark Walk

  From the Diary of Ambrose Delaney Dale

  15 May 1898

  Some progress has been made but it is slow work. One would not suppose there were so many Europeans in the city. Still, I have narrowed the field down somewhat—some several hundred men have been excluded. Collins’s men have found nothing, despite all the nights they have spied in the taverns and the streets. No one has seen the man I seek, or else they do not remember it.

  My own researches have yielded only tantalizingly obscure clues. There is little reliable literature on the subject and, of course, no scientific studies. The books of Summers and Calvert have nothing of substance to add to my search. But in more ancient texts I have found some threads worth pursuing. There are tales of undying alchemists, such as the notorious St. Germain, and so I have begun a search of the shipping manifests of our train and ship lines to seek those ingredients that would have to be imported for such work. Certain events in Paris twenty years ago implicate a Russian nobleman and my agents on the Continent are seeking the truth with the authorities there.

  Henry, of course, scorns all this as a foolish waste of our resources. He continues to press me about the expansion of our mills and shipping lines, as well as urging me to buy out one of the faltering financial institutions in the city. He supposes, of course, that I do not know about the other schemes he has—and the “machinery” he ships to both the Americans and the Spanish for their use in their war. We pretend that we do not know each other’s business—and it is better that way.

  Carstairs has just come with a letter from my Berlin agents. It contained a list of names of those linked to magic and murder there, as well as what historical attributions of vampirism he has been able to uncover. Forty names—but that is better than four hundred. I will send for Collins and have his men begin the search for any in Toronto who bear these names.

  Carstairs is back—the doctor waits in the drawing room. When he comments on my erratic heartbeat, as he always does, I will have to try not to laugh. Whose heart, after all, would not beat faster when its desire is in sight?

  Chapter 16

  She went home. She didn’t know what else to do.

  The apartment was dark and quiet, just as she had left it a week earlier. Ardeth turned on the hall light and looked around. Everything looked familiar, her books, her furniture, the shoes scattering the hallway. But nothing felt like hers any more. It was as if she stood in one of the showpiece homes used to display furniture and an interior decorator’s sense of personal style. All the pieces were in place but no one lived there.

  She drifted into the bedroom and looked down for a moment at her unmade bed. Should she try to sleep here, for when the dawn came? Don’t go home, Rozokov had said. She felt a rush of anger filling her mouth with a sudden bitter taste. You left me, she thought accusingly at the darkness around her. You left me. He had reasons, she knew, and all of them were correct. But the anger felt better than the lost emptiness and she clung to it, letting it curl comfortably around her heart.

  She could not stay here. Rozokov had been right about one thing—whoever was behind all this must never know she had not died at the asylum. She had to leave every trace of her former self behind. That would not be hard. “We are who we were,” Rozokov had said. But I don’t have to be, she thought defiantly. I can be anything I want—and I don’t want to be her any more.

  She looked around the dimly lit room a
nd caught the edge of her reflection in the mirror. That story was a myth as well, it seemed. She stepped forward to stare at her reflected image. Her hair was tangled and dirty, and there was a dark blood stain on the collar of her stolen shirt. Her face looked thinner, cheekbones in high relief where they had once been merely the underpinning of her soft profile. Her eyes were still hazel but the russet in the mix had darkened. They would refract red, as Rozokov’s had.

  But she still looked like Ardeth. She would have to cut her hair, dye it too. She touched the lank tangles. She needed a shower badly. Her new vampiric body did not seem to sweat but her old human one had gone days without a proper bath. She glanced at the bedside clock radio. It was 4:30 in the morning—would anyone in the building be awake, or notice the sound coming from her supposedly deserted apartment? She weighed that thought for a moment, then decided the risk was slight.

  She went into the bathroom, quietly closing the door. She stripped beneath the bright overhead light and then she stared for a moment at her body. The bruises had all faded, healing along with her rejuvenation, but she still looked pale and worn. Even the blood she had taken during the slaughter at the asylum had not been enough to counteract the days of hardship.

  She turned away from the stark image in the mirror and bent over the tub. She turned on the taps and hesitantly put one finger underneath the flow. Another myth gone; the water was no more than a little too hot.

  She slid into the spray with a sigh, luxuriating in the warm water on her skin. She scrubbed away the sweat, dirt and fear, washed the oil and despair out of her tangled hair. She spent far longer than she should have under the comforting spray but carefully cleaned the bathroom after, wiping down the shower and walls, then folding the towel and restoring it to the closet. Unless someone were to inspect the room in the next hour, no one would be able to tell she had been there.