The Night Inside

by The Night Inside (epub)

  “If I need someone,” she said at last, “I’ll call.” He smiled then leaned over to kiss the corner of her mouth lightly.

  “To keep the ghosts away. See you tomorrow.” He was gone before she could speak, vanishing down the hall in pursuit of his ride home.

  Sara stood for a moment in the hallway, then turned back to the empty apartment. Without the television, without the laughter, the silence had a chill that made her shiver. To keep the ghosts away . . . but who’s haunting who, Ardy? she thought in sudden pain. She closed the door, pressed her forehead against the cold metal surface. Are you the ghost haunting this place—or am I?

  Sara dreamed. She dreamed of a soft voice whispering in her ear, asking her to open the door. In the dream, it was perfectly reasonable that it was the balcony door she rose to open, to admit a sliver of night that drifted into one shadowed corner of the bedroom.

  She woke with a start, breath caught in her throat, heart racing. She lay in the darkness, wondering what had wakened her, suddenly sensitive to the faintest sound. Her breathing seemed to echo in the darkness. She had almost drifted back to sleep again before she realized that it was not an echo.

  Terror raised a sudden heat beneath her skin, propelled by the triple-time pounding of her heart. The ancient dilemma of childhood returned—was it better to face the thing looking over your bed, or hide beneath the sheets and hope your own blindness would conceal you?

  At last she sat up and said, with as much bravado as she could muster, “Who the fuck are you?”

  The dark shadow in the rattan chair in the corner stirred slightly. “It is better that you do not know. But I mean you no harm.” The voice was low but clear, with the tantalizing rhythms of a foreign accent.

  “What do you want?” Her vision was improving. The shadow had resolved itself into a recognizably human form, though the face was still no more than the suggestion of features.

  “I have news of your sister.”

  “Ardeth? You’ve seen her? Where is she?”

  “She is dead.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Sara said fiercely.

  “Your sister is dead,” the man repeated.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know.”

  “When did she . . . ?” She let the question end, the hopes she’d held beginning to unravel within her and dissolve into the darkness in the corner.

  “A while ago.” His voice was steady but she doubted him suddenly. Mickey had seen Ardeth only three weeks ago. She was still alive.

  “She’s not dead. Someone saw her.” There was a moment of silence.

  “That may be. But she is still dead to you. She must be dead to you. And you must stop seeking her.”

  “Why?”

  “You endanger her.”

  “How?”

  “The world must believe her dead. She is in great danger otherwise. Your questions, your posters, may have already alerted her enemies.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Let her go, Sara.”

  “No. She wants to be dead, that’s fine. But she can tell me that herself.”

  “You may be watched.”

  “They can’t watch all the time, whoever ‘they’ are. I want to see her. I won’t believe you, I won’t believe anyone until I see her.” There was another long silence and she heard the rustle of cloth as he shifted position.

  “I will do what I can,” the man said, after a moment.

  “These enemies of hers—are they after you too?”

  “With any luck, it is still only I they seek.”

  “Who are you?” she dared at last.

  He rose from the chair and stepped forward. In the faint gleam of light slanting through the blinds, Sara could see that his clothes were shabby and ill-fitting. But there was something aristocratic in the narrow lines of the face beneath the disheveled smoky hair and something compelling in the pale eyes. She was suddenly aware that she was still sitting among the tumbled sheets, wearing only her briefs and her tattered, threadbare Sex Pistols T-shirt.

  “It is still safer that you do not know,” he said softly.

  “What have you got to do with my sister?”

  “She is my blood,” he replied cryptically and for a crazy moment she wondered if he were some long-lost relative, some forgotten second cousin twice-removed. “I will see what can be done. I will contact you. Tell no one of this.” He reached out and slid back the balcony door. “Good-night, Miss Alexander. Sleep well.”

  “After this? I’ll probably have nightmares now,” she said caustically. He turned back to her for a moment, and she saw the faint gleam of his smile.

  “I do not think so . . . Sara. Not tonight.” There was an edge of wry amusement in his voice, then he bowed slightly and the blinds swung shut behind him.

  By the time she had scrambled to the door to lock it again, the balcony was empty.

  Chapter 26

  The fragrance of night woke her—dark-blooming flowers, car-exhausts, the distant scent of the lake. She shifted on the narrow cot and opened her eyes to the darkness. There was no light here in the basement of the church tower, but when she emerged through the trap door to the main floor, moonlight strained through dusty stained glass patterned her naked body.

  Ardeth stretched and climbed the stone stairway that wound up the interior of the tower, pausing when she reached the narrow platform by the window. Earlier, she had brushed away the dirt from the section to clear the glass and she looked through the tiny spyhole to the street below. She heard mothers calling late-lingering children home from the park, the blare of ghetto-blasters from the teenagers waiting for the night’s rituals to begin, the quiet chatter of the elderly Chinese men who sat on the benches outside the tower. In another house the park would be quiet, except for the occasional drug deal, hurried sexual encounter or snoring drunk.

  Her gaze shifted to the ivy covering the tower’s outer walls. The breeze caught it, made it ripple like the skin of a great beast shifting its muscles. She wished she could open the window, breathe in the scent more deeply. She imagined someone seeing her pale face up in the open window, like a maiden in a fairy tale. Like Rapunzel, she thought, and smiled at the thought of what would happen to the prince who tried to scale her tower. No one ever seemed to consider that Rapunzel might have been immured in that tower for a reason. . . .

  The tower of the Church of St. Sebastien stood alone, the original church long since burned down and replaced by an anonymous modern building separated from the tower by hedges and walls. Someone had lived here once, had left the cot she had moved down to the basement, but in the month she had made this her resting place no one had come near it. The tower was quiet and dark, and it appealed to her sense of irony, but sometimes passed very slowly within its narrow walls. Waiting for the full night she needed to leave undetected, Ardeth found herself longing for warmth and light, and perhaps a book to occupy her. But that longing seemed to belong to the living and a world she had lost, so she sat on the landing, letting the moonlight paint the haloed head of the martyred saint across her skin.

  When the voices from the street faded, when the insistent thump of rap from the ghetto-blasters followed its owners down the street, she went back down to the basement and dressed. She dared not wear the fedora since the death of Philip, so she left her dark hair free. She put on a loose black jacket over her Black Sun T-shirt and short skirt, put on her round glasses with the snap-down sunshades. As she dressed, she felt the first stirrings of hunger.

  It had been two nights since she’d fed. She was restless and edgy with the mingled anticipation and uneasiness the hunt always stirred. The feeding, the satiation of the gnawing hunger, was still sweet, especially since she had learned some control over the urges that could push her over the line between seduction and murder. But afterwards . . . there was a lingering guilt and dissatisfaction that undercut her reck
less pleasure, a childish fear that punishment would follow indulgence. The uneasiness lay like a weight inside her, making her draw out the ritual preparations for the night.

  Stop it, she told her reflection in the mirror propped on one wall. No one will reward you for depriving yourself. What did doing without ever get you? A memory flared suddenly, bright and shiny under the moonlight. A child waiting in a supermarket line, while her mother says no, no candy, forgetting promises made to a little girl trying hard to be big. Sara leaning on the other counter, hanging from the edge by grubby fingers. Sara turning around, around, grinning her wide sneaky grin, her mouth full of red, red gumball. Opening her own mouth to tell—but too late. The gumball vanishing into her sister’s smile.

  A rush of anger and hunger washed away the dread. The taste of something hot and sweet, better than any candy, filled her mouth. She snapped down her glasses and went out into the night.

  She paused for a moment at the edge of the park, torn between entering its darkness or heading down towards the lights of Queen Street. There was something in the air, not quite a scent, not quite a sound, that drew her off the sidewalk and onto the manicured lawn of the park. She walked slowly towards the manor house that marked the park’s northern boundary. Nothing stirred under the trees, no bums stumbled from the bushes, no one offered to take her pain away with chemical or physical oblivion. On the path now, she kept walking, waiting.

  There was a man sitting on the steps of the manor, a shabby figure of worn clothing and grey hair. Her gaze touched him, slid away into the shadows, then returned. The night shivered, faded away as the truth suddenly blazed before her, for a brief moment as blinding as the half-forgotten sun. Her heat caught, froze his name in her throat, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them, the trees and path had resettled themselves around her—but he was still there.

  She made herself walk slowly, slowly, counting each step until she arrived at the foot of the stairs. “Ardeth.” The tenderness in that single word broke her control, sent her up the stairs into the arms he opened for her. His kiss was like it had been in the asylum: light in the darkness, warmth in the cold, solid sanity in the shifting madness. All the embraces of her victims, the blind gropings in alleys and empty houses that she had thought were pleasure she realized now were just pale substitutes for this first passion, this first hunger. She forgot her anger at him, all her stubborn resolutions to freeze him out as he had frozen her. She forgot everything but the knowledge that she was not alone.

  “You are a mess,” she said at last.

  “Be thankful these are my good clothes, else I would smell as well,” he replied with a laugh as she shifted up behind him on the steps and began to brush out his hair with the comb from her pocket. They sat in silence for a few moments, then she took his hair in her hand and pulled his head back.

  “You left me.” The accusation hung in the air for a moment.

  “Ardeth . . .”

  “You left me. Don’t. Not again.”

  “It is not that simple.” She let his head go, and dropped her hand back into her lap.

  “It’s as simple as we make it. And don’t tell me we’re solitary creatures. You missed me.” She said it fiercely, clinging to the memory of her name on his lips, his arms opening to her.

  “More than you know. More than I thought I would. But . . .” Rozokov stared out at the park for a moment. “We are dangerous to each other.”

  She heard the ghosts of old sorrow in his voice again. “It’s not just Armitage, is it? It’s something older than that . . . whatever made you leave Europe.” She saw his shoulders tense and he kept his gaze fixed on the dark heart of the park. After a moment, he began to speak.

  “It was Paris, in 1865. Oh, if you could have seen it. The city was bright and terrible, with pleasures that went on all night, and pain that never slept. I met Jean-Pierre there. He was the only other vampire I had met since my transformation. We first saw each other at the opera, when both of us were hunting. At the intermission, we circled each other like wolves, determining threat, trying to establish dominance. In the end, he sent a bottle of wine, very old wine, to my box.

  “We started with that truce, then as our paths crossed more often in the salons and clubs and mansions, we became acquaintances, then friends. Perhaps we were both lonelier than either of us had known. He was younger than I, and much wilder than I had been, even at my maddest. There was a fierce recklessness about him that was contagious. I loved him like a brother, like the mad, self-indulgent, fascinating younger brother I had not had. And had not been.

  “We both had considerable wealth, though he spent his faster. I moved into his ancestral home where he had lived alone since his transformation twenty years earlier. In its gloom we would sleep away the day and rise at twilight to sample the rich tastes of the city.

  “We were welcome in the best houses in Paris; the most beautiful women in that most beautiful city in the world sent us scented letters inviting us to their bedrooms. We went, sometimes together, and left them with dreams of ravishment and no memory of what we really took from them.

  “We had lived like that for a year of nights when I met Roxanne after she tried to pass me false coin one night. She was seventeen, two years out of the countryside, which she’d fled to escape the attentions of a stepfather she despised and a future of babies and harvests and early old age. On the streets of Paris she had found only poverty, pimps and the choice between living on the city’s dark side or not living at all.

  “I would have killed her without a second thought. But she looked in my eyes and did not flinch and that stayed me long enough for her to start talking. She swore to serve me, to keep my house so none would suspect my nature, to be my sustenance if it would not harm her, inventing outrageous reasons why my existence would not be complete without her services.

  “So in the end I took her back with me, after I had laid on her all the hypnotic control I could to prevent her from betraying us during the daylight hours. She was right, in many ways. Our existence was somewhat easier with her in attendance. She was quick-witted, possessed of a sly sense of humour, and, once washed, quiet lovely. Very soon, we could not imagine our household without her.

  “At first, neither of us touched her. Our morals fluctuated greatly, you see—we could be wicked beyond belief, guilty of almost every evil ascribed to our kind—but we would not stoop to abusing our servant. Then one night, after she had been with us for several months, we both returned from our separate ventures restless and unsatisfied. To our surprise, when we confessed our failures, Roxanne berated us angrily, saying that what we needed was right there, unless her blood was not aristocratic enough for us. We were startled, and then Jean-Pierre rose to leave. I suppose that he felt my claim on her was stronger. But she bade us both to stay, unless we thought it would harm her. So we knelt beside her chair and drank from her wrists for the first time.

  “From that moment on, she was not just our servant, but our sister, our friend, our lover. And, in some strange way, our mother. She would call us her beasts, just as a mother calls her sons ‘little animals.’ She gave us what neither of us had ever expected to have again . . . a home and a family, however strange it might have been.

  “The end came suddenly. I still do not know which of our many mad, reckless acts alerted them, or which of our companions, friends, or victims suspected us. But one did. I had been roaming the city, too restless to go home, and when the golden sky finally drove me towards the house, it was already in flames. Jean-Pierre was doomed from the start. I saw Roxanne through one of the upper windows, her hair in flames, then she was gone.

  “The next night, I set about gathering all my money and bought passage on the first ship leaving for the Americas. I came here and lived carefully, fed only from the poor and helpless who would not know me, killed no one, knew no one, loved no one, felt nothing to excess. And tried to forget.”

  She touched
his hair. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I was older, I was supposed to be wiser. I should have been more careful.”

  “That’s why you say we are solitary creatures.” He nodded and she let her hand slip down to caress his cheek, turn his head to face her. “But you were happy then. Were you happy here, all those years ago? Were you happy these last months?” He shook his head silently. “No. You were just trying to be safe. There’s no happiness in safety. I learned that lesson in the asylum.”

  “There is no guarantee of happiness in risk, either. Jean-Pierre learned that lesson in Paris,” Rozokov countered harshly.

  “Then there’s no guarantee of happiness in anything. So don’t leave me again.” She met his gaze, would not look away despite the sadness there.

  “I make you no promises, understand that. We have an eternity in which to break them and the odds are far too great that we shall,” he said at last and Ardeth felt a surge of triumph. What he said was true, of course, but eternity was still far in the future. “Now, I have lingered too long in the past. I found you to talk to you about our present danger.”

  “Oh, are you ready to talk to me about that now?” At his startled glance, she grinned. “I’ve always suspected that you knew more about what was happening than you let on.”

  He told her about his encounter with Ambrose Dale almost one hundred years earlier. “After I fled from his house, I hid myself in my warehouse and set my body to the deep rest that can hold us for years. I did not know that the next day he suffered a stroke and the hunt for me ended. Until this year,” he concluded. “And no we have not only Havendale to contend with . . . but your sister as well.”

  “Sara? What has she got to do with this?”

  “She knows you are not dead. Did you not see her posters seeking you?” Ardeth shook her head. “Then perhaps I managed to find and destroy them all. But she will not stop looking for you and sooner or later her attempts will alert Havendale.”