Ardeth picked up her abandoned clothes, and padded to the bedroom, not bothering to turn on the light. Clean now, she had no desire to don her stolen clothing again. Still, how much did she dare to take from her own closet? How much did she even want to? The clothes there were the skin of the old Ardeth, and she had shed that with the dirt that had covered her undead body. In the end she settled for clean underwear, a Black Sun T-shirt donated to the bottom of her drawer by Sara, and her battered black running shoes. She slithered back into her stolen jeans and kept Roias’s leather jacket. The other dirty clothes she left by the door, to dump in a garbage can when she left the building.
She paused, wondering if there was anything else she could take. This would be her last time here, after all. Most of the things she had valued a week ago meant nothing to her now. But there were one or two items she could use in the creation of her new self. She hunted through the closet and drawers (she had almost stopped thinking of them as hers) and found a pair of wrap-around black sunglasses (a joke from a friend, she did not recall who) and a pair of earrings. The earrings had been a present from Sara, who had dared her to wear them. She never had. They had been too big, too unusual for the person she had been then. Now, the almost gothic look of the faces, the spread wings and the blood-red stones dangling from the metal angels had an ironic appeal. She tucked them into the pocket of her leather jacket.
The last thing she took was the cache of money her former self had kept stored in one of her books. There were nearly three hundred dollars there, and Ardeth stuffed the bills into her back pocket. Even vampires needed money, she supposed, and she was not sure how she would get more. Could she work? The thought of being a vampiric night-shift worker made her smile, even as she rejected the idea. The old Ardeth would have dutifully gone out and got a job in an all-night cafe. The new Ardeth, being dead, was going to make the most of the rebirth she had been offered.
She turned out the lights and slipped out the apartment door, locking it behind her. On the street, she started walking south, towards the bright glow of the downtown core. There, the city lived at night. And so would she.
At the edge of Chinatown, she found an abandoned house. Ardeth hovered on the sidewalk for a moment, studying the darkened houses surrounding it, then ducked between the overgrown hedges and approached. All the windows were boarded up and she could make out the dark tracings of cryptic graffiti on some. She moved down the narrow pathway between the house and its neighbour, stepping over broken roof tiles and scattered garbage. Maple trees hung over the overgrown yard and lilac bushes clustered protectively against the back.
She pushed her way into the bushes and found the window screened and boarded like the rest. Did you think they’d conveniently leave it open for you? she asked herself sarcastically. She ran her fingers over the wood and found the cool metal head of a nail. The window frame must be wood, she thought, and found a narrow gap between the brick surrounding the window and the boards. She slid her fingers into the space and pulled, leaning backwards into the bushes until she felt the board yield beneath her fingers.
“Shit,” Ardeth breathed, as one nail broke to the quick. She sucked the sore finger for a moment, then pulled off another board. Finally she had a hole big enough to wriggle through. She took the shattered boards with her and propped them against the window from the inside, some small concealment for the hole she had made.
After inspecting her camouflage, she straightened up and looked around. She had expected to find the house empty but there was a couch and chair in the room, dust-covered and forlorn. In the next room she found a table and four chairs, sitting in wait as if expecting the owners to return at any moment. One was on an angle, as if someone had just pushed it away from the table to rise. For a moment, Ardeth froze, afraid that someone shared her refuge. She listened intently, stretched out tentatively with the new senses she could barely feel. But there was nothing, only stillness and dust.
She shivered and moved into the next room. I could go upstairs, she thought. There might be beds waiting like in some cautionary fairy tale. But the thought of sinking into stale, dusty sheets disgusted her and the upper storeys seemed somehow dangerous, exposed.
The basement, however, felt safe. It was unfinished and low-ceilinged, but the cold dampness didn’t seem to penetrate her new skin and the weight of the house over her was oddly comforting. No one will come here, she told herself, even if someone else, kids or squatters, breaks into the house, no one will come here.
She found a crawlspace behind the dead furnace and curled up in it, Roias’s jacket pillowing her head. She wondered where Rozokov was, where he had found shelter. “You’ll see,” she whispered defiantly to the darkness and hugged herself, her arms tight across her chest, to hold in the sudden emptiness that filled her.
Chapter 17
The iron gates folded away before him, as if the name he spoke into the monitor was a secret password. Martin Rooke eased the Mercedes onto the road leading down into the valley of the Dale estate. His hands were steady; the shaking had stopped somewhere on the highway.
The car slid beneath the arches of the overhanging trees and then out into the sunlight. There must have been lawns once, he thought, wincing as a bramble scraped against the side of his car. And gardens. He had a sudden vision of figures in white, playing croquet and sipping tea, overlaid like ghosts on the heavy growth of weeds and brush.
He swore softly. Ghosts . . . Christ! This was not the way to deal with this job. From the start, he’d looked at the whole mad scheme as just another business problem. It didn’t matter whether or not he believed any of it—Althea Dale believed it. And the first thing he’d learned when he became head of Special Projects for Havendale was what Althea Dale believed, was.
Special Projects was the top, short of the President, or the Board of Directors. It was about as high in the corporate structure as you could go. When it came to status, nobody seemed to mind that no one knew precisely what Special Projects did.
No one in the mainstream company, that was.
For Havendale’s shadowy underground corporate ladder, Special Projects was also the top. Whoever ran Special Projects got his orders from Althea Dale herself. Whoever ran Special Projects gave the orders that moved the drugs, the guns and the currency that were Havendale’s other business. And for the last year, the man who ran Special Projects had been Martin Rooke.
Of course, after today, it might not be.
He stopped the car in the circular driveway at the base of the flagstone steps. From here, only the red tile roof of the Dale ancestral home was visible, lying like a bloody-scaled snake along the top of the low hill. Climbing the stairs, Rooke realized again how quiet it was here. The woods enveloping the estate swallowed all the street noise, all voices, all sounds that would betray the fact that twentieth-century subdivisions surrounded the nineteenth-century mansion.
The grey fieldstone walls and the long, low length gave the house the look of an ancient stone fence, stretched across the ridge as if guarding something. But behind the house, Rooke knew, there was only an empty swimming pool and an old, unused tennis court. Or maybe what it was guarding was inside, he thought. The Dales had their share of secrets.
The elderly maid answered the door on the second clang of the heavy iron knocker. “Miss Dale is waiting in the office,” she said slowly and turned to lead him down the dark hallway. He bit back the urge to say he knew the way; he knew she wouldn’t pay any attention. He was never unescorted in the Dale house.
The interior of the house echoed the outside—the modern world had barely penetrated it. The lights in the hallway were electric, but their glow was filtered through dim, yellow shades and sucked away by the dark panelling and wallpaper. Portraits lined the walls. Five generations of Dale scions watched him pass, from old mutton-chopped Archer to soberly suited Arthur. Rooke suppressed a grin as he passed that last one. There was no hint in it that old Arthur wa
s rumoured to have ended his days deep in Howard Hughes territory, a paranoid recluse with five-inch nails, poor personal hygiene and a reputation for business cunning that meant no one gave his eccentricities a second thought. There were other rumours too; whispers about women driven to the estate in dark limousines and well-paid not to talk about it, older stories of accidents that happened to people who stood in the way of what Arthur Dale wanted.
There was no portrait of Althea Dale yet. She’d better get one done soon, Rooke thought wryly, before she gets even crazier than daddy was. She might be crazy like a fox when it came to business—the bottom line in the four years since Arthur’s death could attest to that—but this latest craziness could wipe it all away, Havendale family name and all.
The thought sobered him, bringing back memories of the asylum and the edgy tension that always accompanied his meetings with Althea Dale. And that had been when things were going well. . . .
The maid paused in front of the office door, knocking with timid knuckles at the dark wood. A muffled voice called out, then the maid opened the door and ushered him in. “Mr. Rooke,” her voice whispered, then he heard the door close behind him.
Althea Dale was sitting at the massive old desk that looked like it must have first belonged to Archer. Rooke was once again struck by the contrast of the aging glory of the room, with its book-lined walls and ancient wooden filing cabinets, and the smooth blankness of that desk, marred only by the sleek grey metal of the computer terminal on one side and the compact black telephone on the other.
He knew his employer through those two things; through her voice on the telephone and her words glowing on the computer screen. He had only met her in person twice before. Once before his appointment to head Special Projects and once when she called him in to explain the true nature of her current obsession.
Like her father, Althea Dale never left the house.
“Rooke.” Her voice was quiet, controlled.
“Miss Dale.” He sat down in the chair opposite her and waited.
“How did it happen?”
“We’re not sure. The lock to the cell wasn’t broken so someone must have used a key. It might have been one of Roias’s men, Peterson. We found his body in the cellar. The others, including the actors and the cameramen, were all killed near the studio. The films were all exposed or erased.” He kept his voice calm, letting out no hint of what it had really been like to walk into the studio strewn with three-day-old corpses.
“How did he get away?”
“I’m not sure. The vehicles in the garage were all damaged. But the woods around there are pretty thick. It . . .” He caught himself suddenly, remembering her insistence on using the male pronoun, “he could still be there.”
“He won’t stay there. He’ll come to the city eventually.” She fell silent for a moment. Rooke watched her carefully. She’d grown thinner in the last year, face turning bony and gaunt, making her look much older than forty-two. The long, greying brown hair was caught back in the customary braid and she was wearing a white shirt and dark pants. He wondered if they were the same ones she’d been wearing the last two times he’d seen her.
She rose abruptly and paced across the room, hands over her elbows, holding her arms crossed against her body. Rooke felt the back of his neck prickle as she passed behind him, as if her brittle tension was communicable. He found himself unconsciously waiting for her to light a cigarette. As far has he knew, she did not smoke, but her angular edginess always seemed to suggest that she should, that her long, thin fingers were crooking to hold something besides empty air.
“What did you do with the bodies?” she asked at last.
“Called the cleaners in to bury them out in the woods, like Roias did with the women.”
“Can they be trusted?”
“That’s what we pay them for.” He caught the swift, sideways glance of her sunken eyes. “We might have to eliminate them later.”
“Why not now?”
“It’s too soon after the others, those students.”
“That can’t be traced to us.”
“Probably not. But if the police get too many unsolved murders they get nervous and suspicious. Give it a month or two.” She frowned for a moment, then waved away the problem with a brief flicker of her hand. That meant kill them, Rooke decided. That was the one method of problem elimination that Althea seemed to consider foolproof.
“You will get him back.” It wasn’t a question.
“Of course. But he could have gone anywhere.”
“No, he couldn’t. He hasn’t got a passport. He hasn’t got any money. He doesn’t know how to drive. He’ll come back to the city, because it’ll be the only place he’ll find anything he recognizes.”
“Toronto’s a big place,” he began carefully, watching her stalk towards the window to his left. She paused for a moment, staring out at something he could not see.
“He has to kill to survive. He will leave a trail, if you look for it in the right place.” Rooke heard the impatience in her voice.
“I’ll contact our people in the police department. If any unusual deaths or reports turn up, they’ll let us know. And a reward promised to the right organizations should get their soldiers looking for him for us. I can take a print off that film of Roias’s.” She nodded, eyes still trained outward.
“Get the rest of the copies of those films back if you can find them.”
“Buy them back?”
“Whatever.” She shrugged the question away. “I want the laboratory moved here.”
“Here?” Rooke couldn’t help his astonished echo.
“Here.” She looked over at him. “You made a mistake with Roias. I made a mistake letting you. When you get him back, I want him where I can see him. And maybe that will keep more of the scientists from hanging themselves.” He should have known that was coming, Rooke acknowledged. If his mistakes were going to be itemized, Goodman’s suicide was going to be right up there. Never mind that he’d used Havendale’s resources and international crime connections to buy, bribe and blackmail five of the leading researchers in North America without causing any serious rumours in the scientific community . . .” There’s a file on the disk in the computer. It has all my requirements for modifying the left wing for the laboratory. Get the workmen started tomorrow.”
When it became apparent that she wasn’t going to move, he rose and stepped around her desk to retrieve the disk. As he pocketed it, he glanced up and out the window past her still figure. Beyond the empty pool and the cracking asphalt of the tennis court, he could see the faint gleam of something against the trees.
“My father’s grave,” Althea said suddenly, as though she could feel his gaze through her back. “I had him buried there. Outside.” The word came off her tongue as though it was wrapped in barbed wire.
It seemed like a dismissal. Rooke moved towards the door. Her voice caught him. “Get him back, Rooke. And for making me bring the laboratory here, in here,” she paused in distaste, “inside, the modifications are coming out of your salary.”
Rooke swore silently. Knowing her paranoia, the changes could cost more than two hundred grand. But he just nodded and shut the door between them.
The maid was waiting to walk him to the entrance.
He didn’t look at the portraits this time. They didn’t have the answers he wanted, not unless one of them had miraculously changed into a picture of Althea Dale’s soul. He couldn’t get a grasp on that, no matter how he tried. She should have been easy to read, with her neuroses and her tension and the secrets that lurked behind every closed door and lingered like the smell of sickness in the air. He should have been able to find the buttons to push, the weaknesses he could exploit to make her controllable. Every time he thought he found a way to twist her paranoia to his advantage, something would slip and he would catch the glimpse of an amoral, brutal madness that was so far beyond any motive he
could understand that he would abandon his plans.
Arthur Dale wasn’t the only one that there were rumours about.
It wasn’t until the safety of his car that he let himself relax. Two hundred thousand dollars was a small price to pay . . . and there were always ways that amount could be reduced. He’d gotten off remarkably lightly, all things considered.
After all, the price for failure at Havendale wasn’t a golden parachute. It was a long, long fall with no parachute at all.
Chapter 18
The sleep was heavy and dreamless. She woke in the same position in which she had gone to sleep, curled fetally behind the furnace.
Ardeth lay still for a moment, tasting her new awareness. She sensed the emptiness of the house and, beyond its walls, the heavy heartbeat of the city. She felt, deep within her, the faint stirrings of hunger. It is strongest in the beginning, Rozokov had said. She remembered the first taste of Peterson’s blood, the dizzying sweetness, and sat up, shivering suddenly, torn between anticipation and a soul-deep revulsion. But that would have to wait, she thought with relief. There were other things to do first.
She glanced at the stolen Rolex and realized that she had slept for two days. The long night of her rebirth must have drained her more than she had thought. The hunger stirred again, more insistently, stretching in her gut like a waking cat.
She shrugged off the dust from her hair and jacket, left the house the same way she had entered, and began to walk south towards Queen Street. The back streets were quiet, but she could see the figures passing back and forth on the street ahead of her.
Queen Street. Sara’s street, she thought suddenly and remembered her old, half-recognized envy of her sister’s ease here, of her sister’s presence here.
But now . . . now Ardeth had a power her sister had never dreamed of. Now the street could be hers. Any of its black-clad citizens, in all their power and style and pretension, could be hers.
The Night Inside Page 15