“We were just talking about Dr. Corbiel,” Crow said. “And Mark.”
The bottle paused halfway to Newton’s mouth, hovered there for a moment, and then he took another long swig. “I talked with her about that today. No—don’t look at me like that, I’m not hideously stupid. I told her I was researching a chapter for my book and wanted to know about how vam…how these things happen. I told her about what I knew from movies and stuff and she pretty much dismissed all of it.”
“What did she say?” asked Val.
Newton looked over the mouth of his bottle at her for a long moment. “She said that there were a lot of ways, but that if I wanted a definitive answer I’d have to know what kind of…thing…did the attack.”
“Oh, Christ, Newton say the frigging word,” Crow snapped. The smell of the beer was making his stomach churn and his mouth water.
Newton gave him an evil look. “Okay, she said we’d have to know what kind of vampire bit him.” The room went quiet. Newton took another pull. “Jonatha said that in folklore different vampires have different methods of predation and different methods of, um…recruitment.” He finished the first beer and took a second from the bag. “The thing in the movies where a vampire drinks someone’s blood and then makes them drink theirs—that’s a distortion. She said that most transformations don’t even require a sharing of blood. Others require that the victim be willing to drink the vampire’s blood. In a lot of them a person can be transformed by a bite, but even if they revive as a vampire they aren’t evil unless they drink human blood, willingly or not. Apparently there are blood rituals to force a reanimated person to become a vampire. But in some cases there’s no bite at all.”
“What do you mean?” Val asked.
“In some cultures a person isn’t turned into a vampire by other vampires. It’s based on a bunch of other stuff. Dying unrepentant is a big one, dying by violence is another. Being born on certain days of the year. Holy days, I think, but she was going pretty fast and I missed some stuff. It’s a wonder we’re not ass-deep in vampires.”
“Yes,” Val said, her eyes thoughtful.
“So, bottom line is that we don’t know which kind of vampire Boyd was. If we did, then the folklore from that country would tell us what we need to know.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Crow said. “From what I read…and I’m admitting I’m no scholar here, but the problem is more complex than that because we don’t know how many of the folkloric vampires were even real. All we know about is Ruger and Boyd, Cowan and Castle, and even there we don’t know that much.”
Val got up and crossed to where Newton sat in the over-stuffed chair. “Beer,” she said and held out her hand. He obeyed without a hesitation and even twisted off the cap for her.
“Whoa!” Crow said. He patted his stomach. “I think the phrase is ‘eating for two,’ not ‘drinking for two.’”
Val shot him a thoroughly vile look and thrust the beer back into Newton’s hand. “You shouldn’t have brought that,” she snapped.
Newton shrugged. “I shouldn’t have moved to Black Marsh and shouldn’t have met you two. Life’s funny sometimes.” He set one bottle down on the side table and sipped from the other.
Standing, arms folded under her breasts, face set, Val said, “If we don’t know what kind of vampire Boyd was…and if we can’t ever know because he was burned so badly, then we have to find some way of testing Connie and Mark.”
“Jesus Christ,” Crow said, and Newton blanched.
5
Mike was careful putting the key in the front door lock, was careful opening the door, was careful stepping into the hall. He didn’t want to make any sound, didn’t want to do any of the thousand things that could set Vic off. The hall was all in somber brown tones, barely lit by the baseboard nightlight near the coatrack. Ahead of him the stairs drifted up into shadows; to his right a doorway opened to the hall to the kitchen and, closer, into the big living room. Both rooms were dark. No TV sounds, no radio. The framed photos on the wall—people from his mom’s family that Mike had never met—brooded behind their glass windows.
He moved toward the stairs, had a foot raised to step, but something made him stop. He listened to the house, then turned toward the doorway to the darkened living room. Was that a sound?
“Mom…?”
Something moved in the shadows, shifting on the couch. He took a step toward the doorway, and peered through the gloom. He squeezed his eyes shut for a second to try and kick in his night vision and it worked enough so that he could now see that the living room shadows ranged from medium black by the windows to a softer golden brown by the doorway. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness Mike could now see his mother’s figure sitting on the end of the couch, shoulders hunched forward, head bent low.
“Mom, are you okay?”
Mike took a step into the living room, but jerked to a stop. The air in there was so thick it was as if the shadows were made of some viscous matter that choked and pushed against him. His muscles twitched as if they had a will of their own and wanted to flee, but Mike forced himself to stay there, kept his eyes locked on the silhouetted form of his mother. What the hell had happened here? What had Vic done to her?
“Mom…what’s going on?”
Her head turn slightly. “M…Mike?”
“Yeah, Mom. Are you all right? Are you sick?” He stood behind the couch, not ten feet from her, still too conditioned to go any further into the room. Another of Vic’s rules.
“Mike?”
“Why are you sitting here in the dark, Mom?” He took a determined step forward through the resistant gloom. “Look, let me turn on the light…”
“NO!” she shrieked as she recoiled from him. “Just leave me be.”
“Come on, Mom, what’s going on?”
She huddled into herself, turning away from him so that he couldn’t even see the silhouette of her face. “You shouldn’t be in here, Mike, you know Vic doesn’t like you to be in the living room.”
“Mom, if you’re sick or…hurt…then we need to get some help—”
She made a sound and it took Mike a moment to realize that she had laughed. A short, bitter bark of a laugh. “I think we can all agree it’s a little late for that,” she said in a faux light tone that was ghastly to hear.
“Mom?”
“I’m okay. Just leave me alone, Mike. Just go to your room. Do your homework.”
Mike stood there, uncertain. “Well…can I fix you something? Are you hungry?”
She turned farther away from him. He thought he heard her say “Yes,” but he just as easily could have imagined it.
“How about some tea? You want me to make you a cup of tea?”
“I think I heard her say go to your room,” Vic said from behind him.
Mike cried out and jumped as he turned. Vic stood there in the kitchen hallway, arms folded, leaning one shoulder against the wall. He was wearing a tank top and jeans and his arms and chest were cut with wiry muscle.
The moment hung in space and Mike waited for the first blow.
“Now,” Vic said. His voice never rose above a conversational tone.
Mike half turned. “Mom…?”
“Do as you’re told, Mike,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
Mike turned back to Vic, who was not looking at him; instead Vic was staring into the living room at the figure hunched over in the dark.
“Go on,” Vic said and still there was no heat, no edge to his voice.
Defeated by confusion, Mike nodded and backed away, then turned and ran up the stairs. In his room he crouched by his bedroom door, listening through a crack for any sound of yelling, of hitting, of a fight resumed. But everything downstairs was silent.
After twenty minutes Mike closed his door.
Chapter 20
Two days before Halloween
1
Newton sat for over an hour on the hard bench at the Warminster train station, chewing butter-rum Life Savers and drumming his fingers. A paperback book on vampire folklore was open on his lap, but he was too jittery to read. Commuters looked at him with his rumpled outdoor clothes and his razor-stubbled face and assumed he was homeless and gave him a wide berth. Newton was aware of their stares, but didn’t care. In the three weeks since Little Halloween and the trip down into Dark Hollow he hadn’t slept more than three hours at a stretch. Insomnia kept him up, too much coffee jangled his nerves, and when he did drift off the dreams kicked in. It was better to be sort of awake and wasted than to be asleep and at the mercy of his overactive imagination.
For the hundredth time he looked up at the wall clock above the ticket booth. Just shy of three o’clock. Jonatha Corbiel was nearly half an hour late. As each northbound train pulled into the station he stood up and searched the faces of the debarking passengers. Jonatha had given him only a vague and sketchy idea of what she looked like. “I’m tall, dark, and top-heavy.” Amused and intrigued by her description, he conjured images of a leggy beauty with a deep-water tan and a grad-student’s wire-framed glasses. Something like a brainy Jennifer Tilly or a scholarly Jennifer Connelly with olive skin. Maybe someone with the delicacy of a Maggie Gyllenhaal but with lots of wild curling black hair, dressed in the jeans, flannel lumberjack shirt, and Dr. Martens that comprised the dress code of the understipened Ph.D. candidate.
Thus self-conditioned, he was totally unprepared for the woman who suddenly loomed over him like a skyscraper. He had seen her get off the train, but had not even thought that she might be Jonatha despite the fact that she did, indeed, fit the description of tall, dark, and top-heavy. She smiled down at him and in a thick Louisiana accent said, “Let me guess. Willard Fowler Newton, or what’s left of him?”
He stared up at her. “Uh…Jonatha…?” he stammered, rising.