“So I should save you then. Let you drink my blood?”
“Yes, if that’s the way it works. Don’t you see, I can give you everything you need. A safe place to stay, all the blood you need, whenever you want it. Whatever price you have, whatever you want, I’ll pay it, I’ll do it.” She had regained control of herself, finding strength in the mechanics of bargaining and the certainty that everything could be bought.
“You would, I do believe. If you cannot have me by force, you would do it by money. If I asked you for a dungeon full of victims, if I asked you for skulls to drink my pleasure from, you would give it to me, yes?”
Before she could answer, the door opened and Mickey leaned in. “I hate to interrupt but I think the other end of the house is burning,” he said, his voice surprisingly calm. “Probably the computers in the lab.”
“It can’t be the laboratory,” Althea replied. “The halon gas system would kill any fire.” Along with any scientists still trapped there, Ardeth thought. Althea turned her head to look at the static-smeared screen and suddenly laughed bitterly. “Rooke. The stupid bastard put in sprinklers.”
“You and Sara leave if you think it necessary. We will not be long.” Mickey shrugged and vanished. This time, he left the door open. Ardeth put her hands on the back of the loveseat and felt them tighten on the wood as she tried not to imagine how fast the fire could be spreading. Rozokov moved to crouch beside Althea’s chair, looking up into her face.
“You have not answered my question.”
“I’ll give whatever you want, whatever you ask,” Althea agreed, her body hunching forward, eager, hungry. She had forgotten about the fire already, Ardeth suspected. She saw Rozokov’s hand go out and touch one chalky cheek.
“Poor mad one, you truly believe that might buy me.”
“But . . .”
“Should I let you live forever, so that you can gain more wealth, more power and grind more lives under the wheels of your progress? Should I sacrifice another Ardeth to your fear of dying?”
“What are you talking about? You’re a vampire. You prey on people, you feed off them. You preyed on her.” The dark head gestured savagely, the fevered eyes met Ardeth’s with hot envy. “You made her like you. Why not me? I can give you everything.”
“That is what you do not understand. I do not want everything. I want only peace from your pursuit. Can you give me that?”
“If you made me like you, yes, yes, I would leave you alone.”
“Would you? With the secret that we held, could you risk it? With the ransom of the world to be ripped from our blood, without a drop of yours being spilled, would you let us go? Have you done a single thing in the last months to make me believe that?” After a long moment, Althea shook her head. “You do not need my help to be a monster, Althea Dale. You have been that all along. And now you know what I must do.”
“But . . .”
“Shh. You knew the stakes in this game when you started it. But do not fear, I will be quick. That is more than you gave the women who died for Roias’s films, more than you gave Ardeth when you made her a tool to be used and destroyed. But I will give it to you nonetheless.” His voice was still gentle and reasonable but the will behind it was inflexible. He rose and walked around behind her.
Ardeth opened her mouth to tell him what she had discovered about Althea’s past and the things that had reduced her reality to herself and her own desire, turning the rest of humanity into unreal objects that either did her will or were destroyed without a single thought. Then she saw his eyes, and the pain burning through them like fire through parchment, and she closed her mouth.
No matter what she said, he had to kill Althea Dale. There was no point in making it harder for him.
I wanted this, she thought. I imagined this in gleeful detail a hundred times. I almost broke her neck myself five minutes ago. I should be ecstatic, triumphant. But all I feel is empty.
Rozokov’s hands settled on Althea’s hair, shifted gently around her skull. The woman’s eyes were wide and frightened but she did not move. “Do not fear,” Ardeth saw his body go suddenly still, his shoulders tense, “it will be over . . .” His arms moved, snapped hard to the left, “in a moment.”
When he let her go, her head dropped forward. His own dropped in echo, shoulders slumping.
When Ardeth put her hand on his arm, he turned and pulled her close, face against her throat. For the first time, she felt the truth that he had tried to tell her all along, that every death they caused, no matter how necessary, was murder and whatever curse or mutation made them different from the rest of humanity did not absolve them of it, any more than Althea Dale’s tragic life absolved her of guilt.
She thought of Rick and the boy in the sewer and Philip and wanted to weep, to scream, to flee back into the glorious, insulating madness that had sustained her. Her old anger at Rozokov rose, anger that he had left her to commit those crimes, even irrational fury at his seduction of her in the asylum.
She pulled from his arms, trembling, and said, “We’d better go.” Her voice sounded harsh and hateful but he only nodded.
Mickey and Sara were waiting at the top of the stairs, pacing edgily. For the first time, Ardeth could smell smoke and in the distance she thought she could hear the faint wail of sirens.
There were no guards at the door and they left unnoticed. When they reached the woods, the laboratory side of the house was being eaten by flames. Rozokov stared up at them for a moment, face drawn and empty, then Ardeth caught his arm and pulled him away into the dark of the forest.
He guided them to the edge of the estate, near the place where he and Mickey had climbed over the wall eighteen hours earlier. Ardeth followed him silently, grateful that the mechanics of winding her way through the darkness, Sara and Mickey strung behind her with hands linked like blind children, required her full attention. She did not want to think about the rage and guilt twisting inside her, waiting impatiently to explode.
But when they reached the fence, she caught Rozokov’s arm. He studied her face for a moment, then glanced at Mickey. “Wait for us at the van.” Ardeth didn’t watch as they went over the wall.
“Ardeth . . .”
“We’re free. No more Havendale. We can start again.” There was a plea in her voice she couldn’t hide, couldn’t articulate. “This is the new world. No Havendale, no ending like in Paris. No rules.” She wanted him to agree, to repudiate the weary pain she’d seen in his eyes, to give her back the sweetness of the night and the hunt.
“There are always rules, child. Althea Dale lived by the ones that her father taught her. Jean-Pierre lived by the rules of his day, that said all things were allowed to the powerful and the wealthy and the beautiful. And you, my dark daughter, what rules did you follow in re-creating yourself?” The criticism in his voice stung, despite his gentle tone, and she stepped away from him.
“You left me. How was I supposed to know what to do? How was I supposed to know how to be a vampire? I did the best I could.”
“I know. And you are everything a vampire is supposed to be—you are beautiful, seductive, deadly. Were I mortal, I would fall at your feet and let you drink me dry.”
“Don’t laugh at me!” Her heart was torn by the thought that he found her laughable, that he mocked her for trying to pretend she could be any of the things he had said. She was at the wall when he caught her.
“I do not laugh at you, oh love, believe me. You are right in all your accusations. I drained your life from you and left you alone to survive the most dangerous months of our kind’s existence. You have done so magnificently. But I wonder, when you look in the mirror, what do you see?”
“I see what I am.” She couldn’t look at him, remembering her moments of pain in the church tower a night ago, Sara’s horrified expression, her own fear of losing the armour of her new self.
“You see a vampire. Only a vampire. Ardeth,
do you love me?” The suddenness of the question took her breath away, shocked her eyes back up to his.
“Yes.”
“Do you love my teeth, my dead flesh, my red eyes, my hunger for blood?”
“No . . . yes . . . I don’t know what you mean. Those things are part of you.”
“Part of me, yes. Not all of me. I have struggled for five centuries to keep that true.” He took her face in his hands. “In Paris I was a vampire. I drowned in it, in all it meant to me. Jean-Pierre, for all his charm, had never been anything but a vampire, even when he was alive. In Toronto, a century ago, I was just a vampire, too fearful to let myself hope to be anything else. In the asylum I was a vampire. They forced me to be that . . . and only that. Until you. And now . . . now I am going to try very hard to be Dimitri Rozokov again. Who loved Bach and hates Liszt, who wonders what made the stars, who misses the sun and vodka, who needs blood only the way other men need food. That is what I want you to learn to love. That is what I want you to be.”
“It’s not easy.”
“No. It is the hardest thing we can do. But if we do not try, what has immortality made us but undying beasts in an eternal jungle? What then is the difference between Althea Dale and us?”
“What I’ve done . . .” she began, her voice shaking, thinking again of the dead she had left in gutters and sewers and broken on decaying floors.
“Is done. Just as the women I killed in the asylum. Our guilt will not bring them back, nor will our grief. All we can do is go on and try to find some way to survive that does not drive us mad.”
She sighed and rested her forehead against his, his hands in her hair. Ardeth drew a long breath. “Maybe . . . it was hard to be . . . so vampiric . . . all the time. But I thought I had to. I thought I wanted to.” She was surprised to find herself chuckling softly. She put her hands in his hair, and tilted her head to look at him. “You won’t leave me.”
“No promises. But I won’t leave you now.” Then he kissed her and something inside her cracked open, just as it had the last night in the asylum. At last, he pulled away. “We had better go.”
Ardeth smiled and followed him over the wall.
When they came around the side of the van, they found Sara and Mickey sitting between the open doors, untangling themselves from an embrace. Ardeth met her sister’s eyes and smiled, wanting to laugh at the guilty look on Sara’s face. Go on, little sister, you deserve him—you deserve a man who would brave vampires and killers and nightmares for your sake.
“All done?” Mickey asked.
“Yes,” Rozokov replied, and for the moment, Ardeth was content to believe him.
Epilogue
The fire engines began to leave the Dale estate at dawn, followed by the black-and-white police cars that had arrived in their wake six hours earlier. Last in the procession were the ambulances, lights as still and dead as their charred cargo.
The house was a ruin, roof gone, stone walls standing but scorched and black with soot, the interior gutted. Once the fire had escaped the sterile confines of the laboratory, it had devoured the aging wood that had sheltered five generations of Dales.
From the back of the police car, Lisa Takara watched the remaining investigators begin to wrap the smouldering shell in yellow ribbons.
They had been kind so far, accepting her clumsy answers and blank passivity as evidence of shock. So far she had told them only the truth—that she had fled the laboratory alone when it became apparent that Martinez and Parkinson would not leave. That she had hidden in the woods in fear of the confused guards, who had now vanished. That she had no idea what had happened in the rest of the house.
But they would want more than that sooner or later and she needed the safety their solicitude brought her to give herself time to think. Telling the rest of the truth led to only two possible fates, each of them unbearable. A discreet stay in a psychiatric ward “for her own good” and the end of her future in the scientific world if she were disbelieved. And if she were believed, a repeat of Havendale, with only the names of the masters changed. She would lose more than her reputation . . . she would lose her freedom. And so would they: the woman whose terrible story she had overhead, the man who had stood with her life in his hands and let her live.
At last, the house vanished behind the trees. She turned around in the seat, tugging the smoky blanket closer about her shoulders. In the rear-view mirror, she saw the young police officer’s eyes flicker towards her. “You all right back there, Dr. Takara?”
“Yes. Thank you. I might just close my eyes for a moment though.”
“Go ahead. I’ll wake you up when we get to the station,” he said solicitously. Lisa nodded and closed her eyes.
Behind the safety of her mask, her mind formulated and tested the composition of her possible lies, while her fingers absently folded and refolded the scrap of paper in her pocket, a tattered card bearing a phone number she had never called.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to: Gillian Holmes, friend, bat fan and test reader extraordinaire; Neil Bissoondath and Ann Montagnes, for encouragement when it counted; Bill and Aileen Jamieson and Jim and Margo Scott for the use of the cottage and farm; Cynthia Good and everyone at Penguin for making this the best book it could be; Shriekback, for the soundtrack; Kim Kofmel, for lunches, dinners, writing weekends and unending inspiration; and Richard Shallhorn, who watched me turn his big ideas into little ones and who married me anyway.
Thanks to Gillian Homes of the House of Pomegranates for her gorgeous cover and to Suzy McKee Charnas for the kind introduction.
About the Author
Nancy Baker is the author of three vampire novels (The Night Inside, Blood and Chrysanthemums, and A Terrible Beauty) and a collection of short stories (Discovering Japan). Her next book, a fantasy novel titled Cold Hillside, will be published by ChiZine Publications in 2014. She lives in Toronto and avoids writing by working with numbers, gardening, and making jam. You can find out how any or all of these things are doing at nancybaker.ca or on Facebook.
Other CZP eBook titles by Nancy Baker
Read the exciting sequel to The Night Inside!
Blood and Chrysanthemums: Becoming a vampire was terrifying but learning to exist as one is harder than Ardeth Alexander ever imagined. As she and Rozokov try to find a way to live in their new world, an ancient vampire from a far different tradition is searching for them.
A Terrible Beauty: “Will you give me your blood to drink, though you die of it?” In an unexpected twist on a fairy tale, an artist goes into the wilderness to fulfill his father’s debt and finds himself the prisoner of a dangerous, alienly beautiful monster.
Copyright
FIRST ELECTRONIC EDITION
The Night Inside © 1993, 2014 by Nancy Baker
Cover artwork © 2014 by Gillian Holmes
All Rights Reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Distributed worldwide by
HarperCollins Canada Ltd.
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The Night Inside
First published by Viking
The Penguin Group
Penguin Books Canada Ltd
1993
eISBN: 978-1-77148-189-2
A portion of Chapter 9 appeared previously in the story “Cold Sleep,” published in Northern Frights, Mosaic Press, 1992.
“This Big Hush,” words and music by Dave Allen, Barry Andrews, Martyn Barker, Carl Marsh. Copyright 1985 Point Music Ltd. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
“Midnight Maps,” words and music by Dave
Allen, Barry Andrews, Martyn Barker, Carl Marsh. Copyright 1984. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
“The Only Thing that Shines,” words and music by Dave Allen, Barry Andrews, Martyn Barker, Carl Marsh. Copyright 1985 Point Music Ltd. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
“Shark Walk,” words and music by Barry Andrews, Martyn Barker, Mike Cozzi, Wendy and Sarah Partridge. Copyright 1988 Point Music Ltd. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
“Everything That Rises Must Converge,” words and music by Dave Allen, Barry Andrews, Martyn Barker, Carl Marsh. Copyright 1985 Point Music Ltd. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
ChiZine Publications
a CZP eBook
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
Copy prepared by Sam Zucchi and Steph Da Ponte
Proofread by Michael Matheson and Sandra Kasturi
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
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