Atkinson Road ran a portion of the boundary line that separated northernmost Pittsburg from southernmost Frontenac. There, girdled by three vacant lots, a pond, and a building that once served as the old student nurses' dormitory, stood the vacant shell of the original Mount Horeb Hospital. It was abandoned and bricked up when the "new" hospital had opened on the south side of town some decades past.
Although I gave no destination, offered no directions, the cab pulled over onto the muddy, rutted path that parted the weeds between us and the ancient, three-story brick edifice. Vacant-eyed, he half-turned in his seat. "Jeez, mister," he asked through slack lips, "you sure you wanna go here?"
I looked up at the weathered brick walls. Unlike the old Tremont Hotel, these windows had long outlived their plywood barriers and had finally been mortared shut. And now the mortar was crumbling with age. I thought about the labyrinth of rooms and corridors and operating theaters inside that had been evacuated before I was even born.
And so Childe Roland to the dark tower came. . . .
A moment later we were sheltering under my borrowed umbrella as the taxi plowed twin trails of mud in its wake. "I still say you should've stayed in the room," I said as the cat looked up at me and merrowed piteously. "No, I'm not going to carry you. You chose to come along on your own, so you can just hoof it, the same as me."
Come. . . .
The cat stiffened, its tails forming twin exclamation points.
"So, you felt it, too," I murmured.
Come inside. Come out of the rain. . . .
The cat yowled and took off after the cab like . . . well . . . a cat out of hell.
"Wuss," I said as it streaked off, a brown blur melting into the grey mists behind me.
Come. . . .
"Okay, okay; keep your cape on." I turned back toward the old hospital complex and began picking my way through a minefield of mud puddles.
A mental voice has no tone or timbre in the way that speech does when produced from human vocal chords. Even so, there was no mistaking the signature of this summoning: Elizabeth Bachman was putting out the welcome mat.
I could turn back even now. At least that's what I was telling myself. The possibility remained that any willpower I felt was an illusion itself.
But I moved toward the daynest. The plan was not complete: even now it might go one of three ways. Within the hour the final course would be set and the plan locked in. The important thing was to not die prematurely: I had to rescue what remained of my wife and daughter, first.
And then all bets were off.
Climb . . . came the thought as I reached the side of the building.
Of course. With the windows and doors mortared shut. . . . I laid the umbrella on the ground. Then I thrust my fingertips into the slotted spaces between the bricks over my head. Red chips and grey powder sifted down as I pulled myself up. Bricks fractured and mortar crumbled as each new handhold pitted transformed flesh against ancient masonry. I scaled the three stories effortlessly, like a human fly. Or bat. Or something. . . .
Once on the roof the way in was obvious: an access hatch jutted from the flat, tarpapered surface and had been capped with a metal trapdoor. Superhuman strength had wrenched the cover free of its latching mechanism and curled it backward like so much tin foil. No attempt had been made to bend the metal back into a semblance of its original shape: a reminder that these people were careless and sloppy.
But still dangerous.
Come down . . . come inside. . . .
I started across the roof but never made it to the trapdoor. The tar paper sagged beneath my feet and tore like soggy cardboard. I fell ten feet, passing through the remains of a secondary ceiling and landing on a sodden mass of debris on the floor of the third story. The room was empty save for the rusted, skeletal remains of an old metal bed frame. I stood up and allowed the dribbling waterfall that followed me down from the roof to wash the grit and detritus from my already rain-drenched clothing.
"Christopher. . . ."
I scrambled down off of the mound of trash and stumbled to the door.
"Christopher. . . ." No mindspeech, now, but an actual voice drifting up from the depths below.
My night vision was compensating for the narrow cone of uncertain light filtering down from the hole in the ceiling and roof. But, as I moved out into the hall and approached the stairway, the visual greyscale faded to near-black. For the moment, there was only my own, cooler-than-human body heat to provide illumination in the infrared spectrum. The only other source of light was an occasional crack or chink in the mortar of the outer walls and rain-swollen clouds had already turned day into the equivalent of night.
"Fie, foh, fum," I whispered, and groped my way down the stairs. My feet shuffled through patches of loose debris, fallen plaster, and ceiling tiles. And what felt like the desiccated remains of small animals—perhaps birds, perhaps rats. . . .
As I reached the first floor I could see a faint gleam of light another level below. I completed the turn with my hand firmly coupled to the bannister railing and stepped down into the depths. Now I was descending into the basement, below the surface of the earth. Though a vague promise of illumination flickered somewhere below, I felt the darkness pressing in more forcefully now.
I reached the bottom of the stairs and stumbled as my foot sought another step down where no more steps remained. To my left the darkness was cleft by a shimmering thread of gold, a thread which trembled, then exploded with a metallic groan into supernova brilliance. There was no time to shield my eyes: I was dazzled into temporary blindness.
My hands remained outstretched before me as if to ward off the light and the vague shapes that moved within its painful depths. Unseen fingers curled around mine. I was pulled toward the light.
I did not resist: I could not fight what I could not see, and more importantly, I had come to cut a deal.
To arrange a betrayal.
And when the blinding glare had finally diminished, shattered, and fled back to the hundreds of candlewicks that crowned the waxen obelisks scattered about the old boiler room, I looked into the scarred face of Elizabeth Bachman and made my mouth smile.
A wooden ruler, broken in two, and held so that both pieces intersected to suggest a Christian symbol—the triumph of light over darkness.
The potency of belief.
Cool, dry wood, fleetingly touched to the skin and yet the ruin of her face could not have been equaled by burning firebrands in that same amount of time.
The wound began at the left corner of her mouth and angled just beyond the edge of her eye, where it made inroads into the hair at her temple. Bisecting this was another trenched burn that continued on the perpendicular and on down toward her neck. And it wasn't the wealed scar tissue in shiny hues of white, pink, purple, or grey. It was black. Charred flesh that refused even the semblance of a healing. There was no half-hearted, plastic compromise of cicatrix here nor even the more severe keloid deformity that one would expect as the aftermath of a severe burn. Just a hideous crucifix of blackened flesh scooped from the side of her face as if seared by intense heat only moments before.
And, like the wound, itself, the pain hadn't diminished with the passage of time. She teetered on the brink of madness with the unrelieved agony of it.
Undead flesh did not heal like living tissue; it required infusions of living blood to regenerate and knit. Yet the blood she had taken since I had branded her had failed to erase the mark or lessen her pain.
The potency of belief. . . .
Elizabeth Bachman now believed she could only be healed by the blood of the one who had wounded her. By the blood of one who was neither living nor dead. Nor undead. By the same blood that transcended such distinctions.
Blood, she believed, that must be offered willingly.
Not that she wouldn't try to take it by force, I believed, if it was denied her.
"So I have a bargaining chip," I said, as my own superhuman hearing picked up the sound of feet shuffling down the stairs behind us. Dead feet.
"A bargain?" Her mouth twisted and spasmed. "You did this to me and you speak of bargains! You owe me!" she screeched.
A jittery madness seemed to fog the air and I felt my composure slip a couple of notches. "Owe you?" I inquired softly. "I think not.
"The Doman of Seattle may owe you: repayment for your betrayal. What do I owe you? Repayment for violating my family's graves? For working unnatural sorceries with their remains? Tormenting me with false hope?" My own voice was growing shrill. "Tell me what I owe you for that. For stalking and hunting me, driving me from my home, and preferring me dead if I did not ally myself to New York?"
"I was your friend!" she protested, trembling. "If I served the Doman of New York instead of Pagelovitch, that was no concern of yours. You, yourself, said that you owed him no allegiance. And during that time I was looking out for your best interests—"
"I look out for my best interests!" I snarled. "My mistake was ever in letting anyone decide anything for me. Well, no longer! I have learned to put my faith in no allegiance and you, among my many teachers, have tutored me best!
"But—" I hauled myself back from the edge of high melodrama "—I will bargain with you so that we both might have what we want," I concluded in a more reasonable voice.
She stared at me, her body quivering like the plucked string of a musical instrument.
"Your terms?" she whispered.
"First, call off your lackeys. I heard them on the stairs a few moments ago and I know that they have just come through the door behind me. If they take another step toward me, I shall leave this place and your bargain is flown."
Her eyes narrowed. "I summoned you here. I could summon you again."
I picked up a fat candle and hurled it at her. "I heard your call, and I came of my own free will because I wish to make you an offer. Of my own free will. That's the power in my blood. But if you continue to annoy me, I will be done with you and take my business to others who will treat me with respect."
She hesitated.
Call them off! my mind thundered.
She was visibly shaken. She gestured and I felt those behind me back out into the corridor. "You have changed."
"You don't know how much."
"What do you want?"
"Where is Kadeth Bey? Where is the Egyptian sorcerer?"
"Not here."
"Where?"
"Why should I tell you?" she growled. But I had already plucked the answer from her mind: In Weir, lying in the ground beneath Bassarab's barn. Slowly regenerating his shriveled flesh and laying darker plans for the future. . . .
Some twenty minutes to the southwest by car.
"I don't want him eavesdropping on this conversation. So, I'll tell you what I want." I turned and pointed at the grotesque forms of my wife and daughter adrift in the darkness just beyond the doorway. "I want them. I want them put to rest eternally." I turned back to face Bachman before their appearance could unnerve me. "And I want Kadeth Bey."
"You want Bey? Why?"
"So that once they are laid to rest, he can never disturb them again."
She shook her head slowly. "My Doman would never—"
"To hell with your Doman! He can't heal you or you wouldn't be suffering now! I can," I said harshly. "So think about that but don't take too long! What does New York care about Kadeth Bey? He's dangerous, barely under your control, and he's messy. The only reason you suffer his existence is to serve as your hunting hound in tracking Dracula."
"Then you understand why I cannot bargain the Doman's best hope in running the Dark Prince to ground."
"I'll give you Dracula," I said.
"What? How?"
I smiled a painful smile. "You didn't originate the role of Judas, my dear. What makes you think you have a monopoly on it, now?"
"You'd give him to us? But we thought—"
"I told you that I have no allegiances," I said. "None. It's true that I have found those I travel with useful for a time. But that time is all but done. And Dracula? He's the reason my family is lost to me and I'm trapped between the living and the dead."
Bachman's eyes clouded as she weighed her choices.
"Here is my bargain," I continued. "I will give you the Prince of Walachia. Then you will no longer need Bey. Lay my family to rest and I will bring you Dracula. Do with him as you will and then destroy Bey. And I will be content."
Her face became a twisted mask of cunning. "You say you do not trust me. How do you know I will keep my part of the bargain and destroy the sorcerer once you have delivered the voivode into our hands?"
"Because when the deeds are done—and only after I know that Bey is utterly destroyed—I will give you what you want."
"Your blood," she whispered. And licked her lips. "How much?"
"As much as you require."
The right side of her mouth turned down. The distorted flesh of her face kept the left corner of her mouth twisted upwards in a contorted grimace. "Like you, I am not so trusting of bargains where I have no guarantees. What is my guarantee that you will give me of your blood once Bey is destroyed?"
"Hey, babe; you said the blood should be given willingly. You gotta exhibit some trust at some point."
"Nice kitty," croaked a voice from behind me.
I turned and saw Kirsten's small form emerging from the darkness by the stairs with her arms wrapped around a cat. A sable brown cat with two tails. The cat struggled in her embrace, but Kirsten's child-sized arms held it with more than human strength. A brown paw reached up and claws raked her throat. Three of the scratches, though deep, didn't bleed. Something oozed from the fourth claw mark, but then retracted after a brief inspection of its surroundings.
"Why, Chris," Bachman cooed, "all this talk of bargains and trust—and then you bring this creature along to spy on us?"
My mouth was suddenly dry as I looked back at her. "It followed me."
"Well, we can't very well have it going back and telling the others about our little bargain, can we?" She gestured and Jennifer—or, rather, the thing that still wore Jenny's form—extracted the cat from Kirsten's embrace and carried the hissing and spitting animal toward us. I stepped back as it was handed to Bachman.
The cat went still in her grasp as she raised it at arm's length. "My, my, my; what a naughty little pussy! Yes, you are! Yes, you are!" With inhuman speed she shifted her grasp so that one hand had the animal by the neck and the other closed around the base of both tails. Then she brought her knee up and the animal down in swift and simultaneous motions. There was an audible crunch and the cat fell to the floor like a dead thing.
Only it wasn't quite dead. Eyes glazed, it pawed feebly at the floor with its front paws and coughed blood from its nose and mouth. Its torso was bent at an unnatural angle and its hind legs flopped like boneless things, nearly indistinguishable from its twin tails. Bachman had broken the animal's back.
The cat twitched and shuddered and then stopped moving, its eyes focused on eternity in a half-lidded stare.
"It's dead," Kirsten rasped. "Can I play with it now?"
"She's not dead," Bachman said. "At least not yet. She's a lot harder to kill than that." The vampire gave me an appraising look. "I must say, you're a cooler customer than I thought. Back at Pagelovitch's castle I believed—but then I guess your bargain is the real thing, no? You really do have no allegiances, do you?"
I looked down at the twitching form of the broken cat and tried to hide the anger and the horror I felt. What I needed to accomplish here was far more important than the suffering of some dumb beast. And yet. . .
"Wanna play, wanna play," the Kirsten-thing was whining. "Hungry, Mama. Huunnngrrry!"
"I must confess," I said suddenly, "that I am not without some affection for the creature. And when this is done and I leave the others, I had thought. . ." What had I thought? I had to say something convincing before Bachman turned it over to the demon child that ranted behind me. " . . . to take her with me. To keep her as a pet. . . ." My voice trailed off at the expression on Bachman's face.
"Judas wept, Chris! Your ambition knows no bounds!" She shook her head. "When this is done, come back with me to New York, and our Doman will give you a dozen like her."
"Perhaps. Perhaps I will come to New York when this is all over. I would very much like to meet your Doman."
"And she would like to meet you," Bachman said, her lips twisting in the travesty of a smile.
"But before we lay any plans regarding future relationships, let's see if we can work things out in the here and now." The Kirsten-thing was edging closer, and I moved between her and the cat. "You wanted your guarantee, so how about this: when I have given you Dracula and you have given me Bey's destruction, then I will offer you the blood you need in exchange for—" I was about to say "the cat" but something whispered in my mind that I mustn't "—her."
Bachman looked dubious. "I think she will hate you for what you do here, tonight. I think she would rather die."
"You let me worry about that. Now, where shall we make the exchange?"
"Why not here?"
I looked around. "When?"
"How soon can you deliver Bassarab in a tractable state?"
"How soon can you dig up Bey and be ready to pull his plug?"
She stared at me and I could feel mental fingertips scrabbling at the latches of my skull.
"Tomorrow night," she said finally.
I shook my head. "You want Bassarab tractable? It has to be during the day."
"Daylight gives your side the advantage."
"It'll just be the two of us. The others will be left out of it."
"And how will you accomplish that?"
My smile had no humor behind it. "I'm running the show now. Not everyone knows that, yet, but they will by tonight." A thought occurred and my smile turned into a frown. "There may be a problem getting Bassarab's coffin up and onto the roof."
"There is another way in." Bachman picked up a candle from one of the dusty workbenches and motioned for me to follow. "There is an underground service tunnel," she said as I stepped carefully around the twitching cat. "It connects the basement with the remains of the old physical plant to the northeast." A row of boards, standing on end, leaned against the far wall. Bachman pulled them aside to reveal a stone-flagged arch compassing a closer darkness that stank of mold and cobwebs and sour earth. "There's a ladder at the other end that goes up and comes out where the generators used to be. An old sheet of plywood camouflages the opening and keeps the rain out."
"What's the distance?"
"From here to the other end? Maybe thirty or forty yards. Perhaps you should ask Kirsten: she spends hours back in there. It's her favorite place." Her smile turned into a scowl as she looked back over my shoulder. "Get back!" she shrieked. "Get away from her!"
I turned and saw the Kirsten-thing and Jenny-thing step back from where the cat laid.
"Go through the service tunnel," she ordered. "There are plenty of fat, juicy rats there. Hunt until you are full and do not return until I call for you." We moved to let them pass and she turned back to me. "Shall I call the cab for you?"
"No, thanks," I said, "I'll flag down my own ride back."
She reached out and touched my throat, slid her finger down my chest. "I still want to be your friend, Chris. And I will be pretty again, soon." I stepped back so that her hand fell away. "And I will be very grateful for the healing of your blood. Certainly more grateful than she will be," Bachman said, gesturing toward the cat.
I turned toward the stairs—as far as the service tunnel was concerned, two was company and I wasn't about to turn it into a crowd. As I moved to step carefully around the cat, the universe suddenly did a corner-turn on its axis and everything was suddenly changed. . . .
The puddle of blood had grown and so had the body. Suki lay, twisted on her side, eyes glazed, blood leaking from her mouth and nose. She twitched. But only the upper half of her body moved.
How long I stood there, I could not tell. It was Bachman's voice that broke the spell, reminding me of where I was, that moments were passing. "Chris?" Her voice was touched with amusement and surprise. "Chris? Oh my. You didn't know, did you? You really didn't know!" She laughed. "Oh, this makes me feel much better about our bargain! For a while I thought you might be keeping secrets from me. But you, poor baby, you are the one who's still in the dark."
I turned, wanting to do terrible things, but icy will managed a feeble grip on my sanity and held its ground. "The bargain still holds, Elizabeth."
"Now that you know, darling, wouldn't you rather I remove this complication from the equation?"
I pointed a finger of stone at her. "The bargain still holds. She is your guarantee of the blood given willingly." And then I turned and ran for the stairs.
My control held through the long ascent to the roof and my skittering descent of the outside wall. Splashing through puddles and mud mired weeds, I was nearly across the field and back to Atkinson Road when I finally fell to my knees and began to vomit.