Another nod.
"Why?"
That one was too much for him and he tried to get away. I held him with one hand and advised him to calm down. After a minute he ran out of steam, his legs went like jelly again, and I let him sink down to the running board to rest.
I crouched to be at eye level with him. "You seem to know what I am. Do you?"
"Yes."
"Were you and your friend planning to make the world a little safer from vampires?" I should have been more diplomatic-his eyebrows were galloping into his hairline again.
"Please...don"t..."The kid was crying, actually crying, he was that scared. I felt sorry for him and a little embarra.s.sed, and finally pulled out a handkerchief and gave it to him. He stared at it.
"Go on-it won"t bite you."
He took it, suspicious of some kind of trick. When the trick failed to happen, he finally blew his nose.
I shook my head. "Van Helsing you"re not."
He stiffened again. "You know about that?"
"What, Dracula! Yeah, reading it is one of the requirements for joining the union. Maybe you"ve heard of us, the International Brotherhood of Vampires. I"m with Chicago Local three eleven."
He stared. Well, I thought it was funny, but the kid was taking me seriously.
"Matheus-do they call you Matt?"
"No, they call me Matheus."
They would.
"All right, Matheus, I think you should listen to me very carefully so you can get this straight. You and your friend need to go back to New York and do business as usual. You"re probably a very nice kid-you don"t need to be chasing after vampires in the wilds of Indiana, you"re not cut out for it. You got that?"
Now he was looking stubborn. Somewhere deep inside he had a backbone.
"Don"t get me wrong, I think you"ve got a lot of guts to even be thinking of tracking me down. How did you latch on to me anyway?"
"The papers."
"What about them?"
"Your ad stopped."
This was a can of worms I hadn"t expected. "Tell me about the ad."
"It stopped and we wanted to know why, so we called the papers and got your address."
"How did you know about it? What do you know about Maureen?"
"Nothing!"
"What does Braxton know?" But I was overanxious and the kid clammed up again. I counted ten and tried a calmer voice. "Did he know Maureen?"
"I think so, years ago."
"How long ago?"
"I don"t know. Honest, I don"t. But he knew you had been with her... that she had... had... that you might become... but we weren"t sure."
My grip on him relaxed; the muscles felt like water. "Is Maureen alive?"
He shook his head. "No, she"s like you."
"Is she alive?"
"I don"t know!"
"Does Braxton know?"
"Uh-uh. He said he lost her trail, you were his only lead. When the ads stopped he thought you"d found her or that you"d died..." The realization that he was talking to a dead man must have hit him all over again. He sat with his arms dangling, looking at me with helpless horror.
"How did you get on my trail?"
"Through the papers. We only got into town this afternoon, and spent the day looking for you. We got to your hotel, but they wouldn"t help us, even when we described you, so we waited across the street for you to come out."
"So Braxton knew what I looked like?"
"Yes... but I thought you were a lot older." The kid was right. I was thirty-six, but my condition and diet made me look about twenty-two.
"We saw you putting the trunk in the car and thought you were running away, but we weren"t sure-not until you went to the Stockyards, then we knew that you were... you had..." He gulped the idea down. "We followed you, but when you got on the road you didn"t act like you were running, so we just stayed back and followed."
"Biding your time until the dawn, huh? And then what? A stake in the heart and garnish with garlic?"
He squirmed, utterly miserable.
"Well, you ought to feel uncomfortable, that"s just about the dirtiest trick I"ve heard of, and I"ve heard plenty. Have you actually thought about what you were planning?"
He had not.
"Come on, Matheus, I"m really a nice guy once you know me. I am not some kind of diabolical maniac; I even send money home to my mother. Think of it as a medical condition. You wouldn"t try to kill me if I had polio, would you?"
Seeing things from my point of view was a whole new experience for him.
"Except for some physical and dietary restrictions, there"s really nothing bad with being a vampire."
He acted like I"d said a dirty word.
"Would you be more comfortable if I said Undead or would you prefer something else? I know lots of subst.i.tutes, but they"re harder to p.r.o.nounce." I waited for an answer and tried again. "Come on, kid, if I could go back to being like you I would, but I can"t, so I"m just trying to make the best of the situation. I"m not what you expected, am I?"
He shook his head grudgingly.
"Don"t listen to him, Matheus!" It was the mummy, Braxton. He"d come awake and was struggling to pull himself together. He lurched from the car, looking ridiculous as he waved his shoe in one hand like a weapon. After a second he realized a shoe was hardly appropriate, so he dropped it and pulled a big silver cross from his pants pocket.
I stood up, uncertain how to react at this point. Crosses don"t affect me unless they"re large, wooden, and used as a club on my head. My theory on this is that I"m not an evil creature; the use of a cross against a vampire is primarily an invention of the stage and Hollywood. Having the vampire cowering away from one makes for a good dramatic scene, but in reality, things are far different. If these guys were ignorant enough to rely on one for protection, it might be in my best interest to play along. On the other hand, Braxton might just be trying to test me.He pushed himself and his cross between me and Matheus. I moved back quickly because he practically shoved the thing up my nose.
"Back, you demon!" he said, and quite dramatically at that. Matheus was impressed. I refrained from laughing and gave them some room.
"And how do you do?" I inquired politely.
"Did he hurt you, Matheus?"
"Well, no-"
"But he was trying to hypnotize you."
"He was?"
"I was?" I echoed.
It looked as though Braxton was just the sort of dedicated crazy I was occasionally compelled to interview when I"d been a reporter. Even at this early stage in our acquaintance, his manner was easily recognizable. I tried to recall if I"d once talked to him while on an a.s.signment.
"Leave us and trouble us no more," he intoned solemnly.
"Who wrote your dialogue? Hamilton Deane?" I countered.
Matheus looked at me doubtfully. He knew who"d written the play, Dracula, but he still didn"t quite know how to take a vampire with a sense of humor. It went right over Braxton"s head, for he was too caught up in his Van Helsing imitation to pay attention to what I said.
"Leave us," he commanded.
"Listen, buster, you were the ones following me. I was minding my own business.
I"ll be a sport this time and let you go, as long as you run straight back home and stay there."
"No, we will follow you as long as necessary."
That really wasn"t the smartest thing for him to tell me. I sighed. "Matheus, maybe you can talk some sense into him. If I was half as nasty as you seem to think, I could just as well kill you both as stand around all night. I haven"t got the time to waste trying to convince you of my good character, either. Just stay out of my way or I"ll kick both of your a.s.ses all the way back to Manhattan." I turned and walked until I was lost to them in the dark, then vanished and floated back to listen in on what they had to say.
It took a few minutes for their nerves to settle and to convince each other that they were all right. Once the question of health was out of the way, Matheus gulped a few times and asked, "Was he really trying to hypnotize me?"I could imagine Braxton nodding sagely. *But it didn"t seem like he was. He didn"t say anything that sounded like it."
"You wouldn"t remember it if he did. It"s like falling asleep, you don"t know you"ve been asleep until you wake up."
"Oh. What do we do now?"
"We wait him out. He has to come this way, and then we follow him."
"But how can we be sure he won"t just double back?"
"He has become a vampire, he must seek out his home earth. I know he comes from Cincinnati-"
How did he know that? I wondered.
"-and this is the road that will take him there the fastest. He said he had little time. For us time is on our side."
He didn"t know everything. He must have thought I"d changed only in the last day or so; he did not know I was merely augmenting my present supply of earth.
"Are you sure about this, Mr. Braxton? He could have killed us, like he said."
Braxton had a blanket answer. "Lies. He"s only toying with us. They"re very clever, these creatures, but you"ll remember that he was the one to give ground before us."
I could almost see him waving his cross and puffing out his chest. Whether I was playing with them or not depended on how much they bothered me. Amateurish and ill informed as they were, they could still prove to be very dangerous.
During my daytime oblivion I was completely vulnerable. My best chance of survival would be to lose them and hope they"d give up and go home. I had no desire to do them violence.
I left them and returned to my car, starting it up. They would hear the noise and be starting theirs as well. I drove slowly past, their white and defiant faces staring grimly back as I waved. Matheus was getting himself ready for the road race of his life.
It must have been a terrible letdown when their car swayed onto the road and with a lurch betrayed the presence of the flat tire.
I hit the gas and left them behind. It would take about ten minutes for Matheus to change the tire, probably a lot longer with Braxton helping him, and by that time I planned to have a healthy lead of fifteen miles or more.
Chapter 4LUCK WAS WITH me and I managed to avoid the notice of cops looking for speeders, arriving in Cincinnati with enough time to spare to find a place to stay.
The best protection was with the herd, so I checked into one of the bigger and busier downtown hotels under a phony name. The Buick disappeared into a distant parking lot with a lot of other late-model cars.
A sleepy bellhop manhandled the trunk into a modest single with a bath. I dispatched him with a fair tip and hung out a sign to ward off the maid. My suit and body both felt rumpled from the long drive. I wanted a hot bath, a quick shave, and the inside of my trunk, and got them in short order.
Sunset seemed to come again a few seconds after I closed the lid. While in my earth there was no sense of time pa.s.sing, but the day had gone by as usual, since I felt rested and alert. I was in fresh clothes, checked out, and in my car in record time. My goal was to be back in Chicago that same night, so I hurried now.
What was left of my grandfather"s farm wasn"t too far from the city, but owing to the twists of the road, it was still fairly isolated. Once I turned off the farm-market road and onto the weedy ruts that led to the house, the trees closed in, and it was like going back in time. The Buick was a noisy intruder into a simpler and slower age, so I cut the motor and walked the rest of the way with Escott"s sandbags in one hand and the new shovel and some rope in the other.
The place hadn"t changed since my last visit in August. It still looked forlorn and overgrown, but not completely neglected. My father came out occasionally to check on things. He kept the gra.s.s trimmed in the little graveyard where we"d been burying our own for the last seventy-five years. The house was boarded up. It would have looked sinister except for the neat paint job. Even the three-seater outhouse in back had gotten a coat against the winter. It was as though it had only been temporarily closed for the season and the family would return in the spring.
I went to the cemetery. The earth near the big oak tree was vaguely scarred from my last expedition for soil, but not so much that the casual eye would notice. As before, I cleared another large area of fallen leaves and began scooping an inch of topsoil off and into the bags. I could have dug deeper, but that would leave definite signs, and I had no desire to accidentally include earthworms in my booty.
Whether dirt specifically from the family cemetery was necessary for me to survive had been a question in my mind for quite a while. My prior researches indicated that all vampires must be in their graves by dawn, and had I truly died, my body would certainly be resting here with the other Flemings. I suppose any of the earth in the immediate vicinity would have been suitable, but there was no time for experiments. I had a traditional turn of mind, anyway.
As I worked, my mind was already on the road, retracing the route back to Chicago and deciding which places to stop for gas. I vaguely wondered if I would again be plagued by Matheus Webber and James Braxton. They were worrying, but there wasn"t much I could do about them until I could get their names to Escott.
Hopefully he might be able to trace them down in New York while he was there, then I might remember where I"d met Braxton- The work and thought were interrupted by several heavy objects slamming against my body like cannonb.a.l.l.s and knocking me flat.
Two hard things caught me full in the chest, and a third had cracked against my head. In the very brief time between impact and hitting the ground I decided they were large rocks and that somebody really had it in for me.
The last rock must have been the size of a brick, but I hadn"t been killed, or even concussed. There are undeniable advantages to being supernatural.
My body fell back and rolled. I glimpsed a whirl of leaves and branches that abruptly faded to gray and then to nothing. My body had taken things over again and I"d dematerialized from the shock of the sudden pain. No emergency called me back, so I remained disembodied and was glad of it. Floating upward until safely within the concealing branches of the oak, I slowly re-formed, arms and legs wrapped around one of the big limbs.
I was about thirty feet up, and once solid, had to endure a few bad moments of recovery. My head was the worst, I had to cling with my eyes squeezed tight until the dizziness pa.s.sed. I hate heights.
While hiding in the tree and counting my blessings, developments were taking place below. Three foreshortened figures came into view and prowled uncertainly around my excavation. They were rough-looking men, each with a rock in one hand and a big stick in the other. Had I not vanished immediately they would have probably followed up with those clubs. The clubs were of wood and would have succeeded wh.o.r.e rock had failed.