An Old Friend of the Family

TEN

The phone awoke Joe Keogh from some dark nightmare, the sound an overwhelming relief because it meant nightmares were over and it was time to go to work. He had the receiver in his hand before the memory came that this was supposed to be another day off for him. And why it was.

“Hello Joe, this is Judy.”

“Judy—what’s up?” It was broad day. His watch, still on his wrist, said after ten. Last night he had drunk too much, finishing a bottle of scotch alone. He didn’t notice any hangover, though, just a dullness. All life was a hangover, these days.

Judy’s phone voice said: “There’s something you have to know.”

Now sitting naked on the edge of his single bed, Joe was staring at a curl of house-dust on the bare hardwood floor under the small bedside table that held the phone. That curl had been there when Kate was still alive.

“What is it?” But before he finished asking, he was sure he knew the answer. Johnny’s body had been found.

“Kate’s body,” the phone-voice told him, and he had a sudden sensation of re-entering a bad dream that he had been through once before. He did not answer immediately.

Judy went on: “She—her—she’s missing from the morgue this morning. The Chicago police called us about half an hour ago.”

“Missing.” Rubbing his eyes made things no clearer. “Are you sure it was really the police who called?” A kidnapping-mutilation and a mysterious death in the same prominent family were sure to draw warped jokers to the scene.

“Yes, the other police are still tapping our phone. And the Chicago police had Dad call them back. It really happened.”

Judy’s voice sounded more hopeful than dismayed. Well, she was a little weird sometimes. Joe sighed. “It wasn’t just some mixup at the morgue? Someone took the wrong body to be buried?”

“It doesn’t sound like it could be anything like that. One doctor remembers seeing her there yesterday afternoon. This morning some other doctor went to look, getting ready for the examination. And she was just gone.”

He could make no sense of it. “How are you managing, Judy?”

“Mom and Dad are just numb, I think. Gran seems more upset by this than they are.”

“Oh. But I meant you.”

“Me? I’m coping okay. You sound like you are, too.”

“More or less. Look, did you hear from Dr. Corday this morning?”

There was a pause on the line. “Why do you ask? Did he get back to his motel okay last night?”

“Yeah, I dropped him off. Look, just hang in there, kid. I think I’m going to come over and see you.”

As Joe hurried into his clothes, his mind was fixed on the remembered face of the old man who last night had been so intent on getting into the morgue. He turned the image from fullface to profile and back again, as if Corday were standing before the black-on-white hatched inchmarks of the lineup. Put on your hat, take it off. No, no face that Joe had ever seen before.

Kate—gone. But that wasn’t accurate. Kate had really been gone for days. The body on the right slab or the wrong slab had been hers, but it was not her any longer, and he could feel no vital concern for anything that happened to it. This morning’s bad dream wasn’t a new tragedy, only a new craziness.

Dressed and shaved, he called the Shores Motel. Dr. Corday was registered there, all right, but his room didn’t answer.

Joe decided to give himself time for one cup of instant coffee—after all, there was no way in the world that the old guy could have stolen the body last night, in the five or six or seven minutes he had been out of Joe’s sight. Joe dropped two slices of bread into the toaster. Of course, he could have returned to the morgue again later. . . .

He sat at the small table in the dining alcove of his small apartment, and tried to get his thinking back into a police track. In police work you couldn’t very often accept that strange happenings were just coincidence; last night the rather strange old man had prowled around the morgue, and this morning she was gone.

In police work also, on the other hand, you had to start with what was possible. In fact, the old man could not even have got into the building there last night. Someone had, though—or did Judy have the story garbled?

Still chewing toast, Joe picked up his phone, dialed a number in Homicide, and asked for Charley Snider.

“Charley? This is Joe Keogh. What is it, what’s the story?”

“Oh yeah, the story. I’ll give it to you straight, man. I know what this must be like for you.”

“Just tell me.”

“The thing is, she was there as of about ten P.M. last night. Everybody swears all was in order then, at least. Then, man, as of six-ten this A.M., when one of the junior pathologists decides he wants a preliminary look, she was just not there. Empty bin’s correctly labeled. All the paper work’s in order, as near as we can find out. No bodies were officially removed from the morgue in those eight hours. The only other funny thing is the lockers where the clothes and other personal effects of the, uh, customers are kept; somebody had been digging around in there, it looks like. No locks broken, but the stuff’s all scrambled, and we don’t know yet if Kate’s property is missing or not.”

“Family hadn’t claimed her things?”

“Not yet they hadn’t.”

“No signs of a break-in?”

“None we’ve discovered, it’s a big place. We got our men still swarming through there. We’re checking out everyone who was on duty there last night. So far’s we know, no weirdos among them.”

“That’s something.”

“Hey, man, one more thing. Remember, we found Kate’s Lancia in the pound? It had been towed away from that hydrant. Anyway someone left a big fat thumbprint right on the rearview mirror, angle seemed to show it was someone reaching from the right seat. It’s being checked out in Washington now.”

“It’s probably some garage man’s. No, it’s probably mine; I’ve ridden in that car a lot.”

“If you got any ideas we can try, I’d like to hear.”

“No, no ideas.” His suspicions of the old man, if they really were suspicions, had to settle into some kind of a sane pattern before he threw them out as a tip. An old friend of Clarissa’s, after all. “Thanks, Charley. I’m going over to the Southerlands’ for a while, in case you want to reach me.”

He sat there for a minute staring at the cradled phone, but seeing the old man. Then he took a jacket from the closet and went out the door.

* * *

Snow, gentle-falling, soft as white night, dimmed the scorch of day to muted gray for the old man, dulled for him the multicolored windows of stained glass that in bright sun would have been explosions of discomfort. He needed rest and sleep. Not, as yet, to the point where his survival was in question, so he stayed on his feet and active. Tomorrow, though, he was certainly going to have to sleep.

Besides dulling the sun, another eminently satisfactory effect of the snow was that it seemed to discourage visitors to Lockwood Cemetery. Or perhaps Americans were just not as enthusiastic as Europeans about visiting their dead. Anyway, during the whole morning he had heard no more than three or four vehicles whispering around the gravel roads of the cemetery, one of them a pickup truck with snowplow attached, that seemed to make but little progress in getting the drives clear.

Gently, but very insistently, the snow continued to fall. By two o’clock it lay ankle-deep on the broad lawns and weathered stones of the cemetery’s old section, and clung to the wrought-iron fences, obscuring the signs that warned about the guard dogs being loosed here after dusk. The snow and the dogs were all fine with the old man who stood looking out from inside the Southerland mausoleum, his eye to a small chink he had broken in one window of stained glass.

He supposed that this mausoleum was old and large, as such things went in this young country. It was a one-room house of marble no warmer and no colder than the snow, or than the bones it sheltered—or than the living but unbreathing flesh that it concealed today.

At intervals, when he grew weary of looking out, five or six long paces took the old man from one end of the cold room to the other. This included a slight detour around the empty sarcophagus and the decorative urns that had been planted in the middle of the space. Looking at them, he could see why Andrew had exiled them here, ugly decorations no one wanted to behold. The central sarcophagus was unoccupied; so far all internments had been in the vaults built into the thick outer walls. Southerlands and their kin who had died in the past seventy years or so were there, behind the waist-high doors of green-patinaed bronze.

Kate was lying just above one such door, on a wide marble ledge set below another stained-glass window. She had been lying there since just before the wintry dawn, curled up like a sleeper, wrapped in a sheet that revealed only her head.

Kate lay on her left side, facing the room, but with eyes closed. One arm tucked beneath her head, she had scarcely moved for hours. The coarse sheet wrapping her from toes to neck bore on one corner the stamped legend, PROPERTY OF COOK COUNTRY MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE. While she was not fully awake, she was not fully asleep either; which was one reason why the old man, finding himself thrust into the role of midwife for her new life, hesitated to leave her alone, even though other important matters demanded his attention.

This half-sleeping condition of Kate’s had him somewhat puzzled. No reason, he thought, why she should not be able to sleep the daylight hours away, in this her native sepulcher. In fact when he brought her here he had expected her to slip into a deep sleep at once.

He came back now from another squint out of the broken window, to stand motionlessly regarding her. His black topcoat was open, his dark hat set at a slightly jaunty angle, his dark glasses off, his hands behind his back.

Suddenly Kate’s eyes flew open. “I don’t know you,” she said, in dazed mistrustfulness. Her speech was newly awkward: sometimes she forgot to take a breath before she started talking, for breath was no longer a requirement of her life; sometimes she drew in too much air, and the end of a phrase was punctuated with a sharp puff of the surplus.

She had protested that he was a stranger enough times for him to have lost count. But if patience with her confusion was costing him an effort, he had not let that effort show as yet. “I am an old friend of the family, Kate,” he repeated, yet again. “Of your Grandmother Clarissa’s in particular. I have brought you here for your own protection.”

Kate moved her body substantially now for the first time in hours, rising on one elbow. “How did you bring me here?”

This question and answer too, they had been through several times before. “Think back, girl—what do you remember of our journey?”

Kate’s blue eyes looked into the distance. This time round she was going to manage to take the conversation at least one step farther than before. “There were doors, somewhere . . . in a couple of different places . . . and you told me that because it was after dark we needed no keys; we could slip through.”

“What else?”

“It seems to me that I can remember—flying. Like something in a dream.”

“Trust your memory, Kate. It was no dream. Now, what is the last thing that you can recall before our journey? Think carefully.”

Obediently she retired into her own thoughts, to surface again in a few moments. “I can remember being at a party.”

“Excellent! We are making progress. Where was the party?”

“I . . . can’t remember.”

“Try.”

Kate seemed to be trying, but had no success. He pressed on: “After the party, then. You perhaps left with someone?”

“Yes . . .”

“Who was it?” The old man could hear, perhaps half a kilometer away, the snowplow scraping slowly.

“He said . . .” Suddenly Kate sat bolt upright on her shelf, clutching the sheet about her. “He said his name was Enoch Winter.”

“You have said that name before.” The questioner nodded with satisfaction. “And what does Enoch Winter look like, little one?”

“He’s big. Very tall. Very strong.” The last word ended with a little shudder, wherein horror and repulsion were mingled with the memory of delight.

“Taller than I am? Look at me.”

Obediently Kate looked. “Oh, yes. By several inches.”

For a long time, he mused, I was considered very tall myself. Now I am scarcely above the average, I suppose. Shall I someday qualify as a midget?

Aloud, he asked: “His hair? His eyes? His face?”

“Dark curly hair. Sort of a deep voice, but much rougher than yours. His eyes are blue, or maybe gray. I’ll know him if I see him again.”

“Indeed, I should think you—” He broke off, watching her with great intentness.

Kate’s gradual return to full awareness had reached a critical point. Now she was looking with terror at the marble walls, the stained glass, and the tombs surrounding her. “What is this place?” Her breath momentarily forgotten, the question fell into a mere soundless mouthing of the words. Then she drew in a gasp of air. “I know where I am. I know what this is.”

“I am your friend,” the old man said with iron will, “and you are safe.”

Words, even from him, were not enough. Kate screamed and leaped in mad panic from her shelf, a corner of the sheet trailing like a cape. She landed awkwardly, but with catlike new strength supporting unsprained ankles. Without a pause she sprang toward the single door of the mausoleum.

Before she reached it, though, the old man was beside her, and had an arm around her waist. Despite the new strength with which she struggled, he drew her back and soothed her like a child. “No, no. You do not understand the dangers yet.”

A moment longer Kate fought for her freedom. Then she slumped in his grip, her eyes crazed. “I want to go home.”

His clasp was almost tender. “I think you know,” he said, “that you are as close to home right now as you are ever likely to get.”

A few seconds passed. This time the movement she made to free herself was deliberate and almost calm, and so he released her. She moved a few steps off and turned to face him, now fully aware—and horrified. “I heard a policeman say that I was dead.”

“Very likely you did.”

“You can’t convince me that I’m dead!”

“My dear girl, I have no intention of trying to convince you of such an absurdity. Neither of us is dead—except to our old, breathing lives.”

“Then—what—?”

“You have been through a great change. And understanding it is going to take some time.” Acceptance and understanding, the old man knew, did not often come fully on the first day out of the grave.

Kate was frowning down at her swathing sheet. “Where are my clothes?”

The old man walked to one of the crypts and tugged open its bronze door. The interior was empty save for two bags, one a white laundry sack, the other somewhat smaller, and elegant black. He brought both of them back to Kate. “You have some choice of apparel, thought I am not sure the outfit in the white bag is complete.”

Wonderingly, Kate reached into the laundry sack and extracted from it first her warm blue jacket, rolled up small; then blue pants and a sweater. She looked at the old man with narrowed eyes, then dug into the other bag. Out first came brown slacks, then a brown sweater, shoes to match, a small mass of soft undergarments. “These are mine.” There was more sharpness than fear in her voice now. “But I was wearing the blue. Where did you get these?”

“Ah, memory is firming up. Good. The brown clothing I obtained very early this morning, from your home.”

“My home. You’ve been there. What did you tell them, what—?”

“Gently, Kate, gently. Your family thinks that you are dead.”

She shook her head. She backed away from the old man a step, her lips forming another word.

“He thinks so, too. For the time being, at least, it is better so. Later, there will be decisions you must make, regarding those you love. But that must come later, when you know more. Now I am going to look out the window while you dress. Then will we discuss what must be done.”

When he turned from squinting at the snow, he found Kate garbed in brown. He took from her the blue clothing, including the warm jacket she no longer needed. These garments he put back into the empty crypt, the only convenient drawer this dwelling-place afforded.

Challengingly, Kate followed him. He smiled to see in her something of her younger sister’s bravery. “Now,” she demanded, “I want to know who you are, really. And what has really happened to me.”

“Very well.” He looked steadily into her eyes. “I am a vampire, Kate. Because Enoch Winter exchanged his vampire blood with you, you have become a vampire also. I am sure that there is in your mind much superstitious nonsense regarding our race, which you must now begin to unlearn. We’re not all as bad as Enoch Winter.”

The girl first tried to laugh at him. Then she tried to look indignant, that he should offer her such nonsense. He could see her wondering what she should try next. He could see also that the energy of terror was fading; a normal daylight trance should overcome her soon.

“But why,” the old man mused aloud, “has the infamous Enoch Winter done this? Under other circumstances we might merely ask why any rapist does what he does. But there is also the attack on your brother to be considered. There must surely be a connection.”

“What attack?” Kate didn’t completely believe, yet, anything he’d said. But already she was swaying on her feet.

“Time to discuss that later.” He picked her up, gently; it was almost a matter of catching her as she began to fall. One of her pale hands pushed feebly at his chest in protest, but her eyelids were closing, and she could do no more.

Now she should sleep, until the night at least. But before he put her in a resting place, he stood for a moment, listening intently. A motor vehicle, a small auto whose sound he thought he might just possibly recognize, was drawing near over the cemetery’s unplowed drives.

* * *

Joe Keogh’s Rabbit crunched to a stop in snow unmarked except for a few tracks left by the fur-bearing variety. He supposed the bunnies had a good thing going in a cemetery, except maybe after hours when the guard dogs were let in. Anyway the snowfall had now stopped, though the sky was still almost completely overcast. In the west the clouds were stretched to a thin silver sheet covering a sun already on its way to the horizon. The shortest days of the year were here.

Beside Joe, Judy sat gazing with an unreadable expression at the snow-etched stones of the mausoleum’s front. He studied her with concern for a little while, then asked: “Did you want to look at something in particular?”

Still looking at the building, Judy shook her head slowly, disappointedly, almost. What could she have been expecting? She said: “It’s just that the dreams were very real.”

“But still only dreams,” he told her gently. “Right?”

She didn’t answer.

“Get a hold of yourself, kid. How could they be anything else? Kate is dead. Whatever else has . . . I admit it’s possible that Johnny might be locked up in a closet someplace, the way you describe it in your dream. But—”

“Joe, I could find that place. I know I could, if you would only drive me around and help me look.”

“Don’t start that again, please.” And at that moment, beyond Judy’s face, beyond the undisturbed white that covered lawn and walk in front of the Southerland mausoleum, Joe saw the green-aged bronze of the building’s door in motion, opening inward into a contrasting blackness. And despite the hardened realism created by eight years on the force, the sight produced a moment when something in his heart began to open into blackness also.

Then it was nothing more frightening than a shadowed doorway in a marble building, with the recognized though unexpected figure of a lean man in dark clothing emerging from it in a quite ordinary way. A penetrating voice called down to them: “Judy? Joe?”

Judy, Joe noticed, seemed not at all surprised. Perhaps she was no longer disappointed, either. Frowning, he shut off the engine. They both got out of the car.

Corday had remained beside the mausoleum’s open door, frowning through dark glasses at his watch. “I fear I have lost all track of time,” he muttered as Judy and Joe trudged up the virgin walk toward him. “The urns proved more engrossing than I had anticipated.”

“My father did give you the key, then,” Judy remarked placidly, twirling the end of her scarf. Joe wondered suddenly: could she have been expecting that we’d meet him here?

Corday was smiling at her lightly. “There was no trouble about the key.”

Joe asked him: “How did you get out here, Doctor? Take a cab?”

“No, someone kindly offered me a ride from the motel this morning.”

“Must’ve been early. Snow’s covered all the tracks completely.”

“Indeed, it was.”

Judy put in: “If you’re ready to leave, we can take you back to the motel. Or wherever you want to go.”

“Thank you, my dear, that would be kind.”

Corday was in the act of pulling the mausoleum door shut behind him when Joe stepped forward, saying: “As long as we’re here, I’d like to take a look at the pottery to . . . Judy, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just felt a little dizzy, all of a sudden. I’m all right. You go on in, but I don’t want to.”

She looked so white-faced that Joe and Corday between them, both peering at her anxiously, walked her down to the car and saw her settled in the rear seat.

“I feel better now. I think it was just a little too much like the dream. Go ahead, Joe, I’m all right.”

The two men marched back up to the dark doorway, over the now well-trampled walk.

“You first, Doctor.”

With a slight bow, the old man went on in. Joe followed. Once inside, there was really plenty of light, coming in the windows. The doorway had looked so black from outside only by contrast with the snow.

Plenty of light, but not all that much to see. Joe wasn’t really sure what he was looking for. The tombs and their decorations, and the big urns, and maybe Corday was really enthusiast enough to want to spend a day here in the cold among them. Joe’s breath steamed in the air. To him, the place looked not much different from a fancier-than-usual funeral home, or the inside of one of the older Chicago churches. It reminded him a little of the chapel of Thomas More University, where he had been going to take Kate a couple of days before Christmas, to see The Play of Daniel . . . there was plenty of pottery here, all right, and in this large urn someone’s crumpled bra, which must have been here since last summer, so evidently the door wasn’t always kept carefully locked.

As soon as his eyes met Corday’s again, he told the old man bluntly: “Kate’s body was missing from the morgue this morning.”

Corday’s response was controlled surprise, or at least a very good imitation thereof. “Really? Is such a thing a common occurrence there?”

“Very uncommon. I was wondering if you might have any ideas about it.”

“Because I wanted to go there last night? No. No, I should not care to venture an opinion. Joe, what brings you and Judy here to the cemetery this afternoon?”

Joe sighed. “The kid had a very vivid dream last night. A couple of dreams, rather. She’s upset—of course. Anyway, one dream was that Kate was here, in the family mausoleum, alive, but unable to get out of the place for some reason. And all day today Judy’s been saying she thought she’d go crazy if she couldn’t get out of the house for a while. Andy’s back at the office, being a workaholic as usual. Lenore is—sedated. Clarissa can’t decide anything. I finally just took it upon myself to decide that Judy would be better off getting out, and it’d be safe enough if I rode shotgun.” He blinked at Corday’s blank stare. “Chicago cops always go armed, you know, even off duty. So here we are.”

While Joe talked they had been slowly gravitating back to the doorway. Now Corday gestured and Joe stepped out. At the bottom of the little slope, Judy’s scarf-wreathed face smiled back from the small car’s window.

Joe led the way down to her. Behind him he could hear Corday shutting the metal door of the mausoleum carefully, and the key turning, grating, in the little-used lock.

Judy looked well enough when they rejoined her in the car. “I think it was just the idea of going in there,” she said again. “I didn’t want to go in after all.”

“Natural enough,” said Joe, getting the engine and heater started. Why was the old man here, today? "Where can we take you, Dr. Corday?”

The old man, in the right front seat, was twisting round to face the back. “Joe tells me you had two vivid dreams last night. What was the second?”

Judy smiled, a quick little flicker, as if to mark the passage of some secret between her and the old man. Then her face turned bleak. “Towards morning I dreamed of Johnny. He was in a closet somewhere. All naked, and bloody, and . . . just awful. God, I hope it isn’t true. But I can’t stop feeling that it is.”

“And can you lead us to this closet?” The old man was intensely serious.

“I’m taking her home,” said Joe, and reached to move his selector lever into Drive. The old man’s fingers settled gently on his wrist. Joe urged his own hand forward anyway; his hand stayed right where it was, as if he were trying to lift the car with it instead of one thin elderly arm. He felt ridiculous. What was he going to do now, start a wrestling match?

The old man continued to stare at Judy, and Joe followed the direction of his gaze. He was disturbed to see that although Judy still sat up straight, her eyes were closed and the utterly relaxed expression on her face suggested that she was asleep.

In wonder, he asked: “Judy?”

“She is asleep,” Corday informed him soothingly, and at the same time let go of Joe’s wrist.

“Judy, are you all right?”

“Answer Joe, Judy.”

“I’m fine.” Her voice was pleasant, but remote. Her eyes stayed closed.

Corday asked her: “Can you now guide us to the building where John is being held?”

“Yes.” Her voice held sudden urgency. “Turn west as soon as you leave the cemetery.”

Joe looked at her a moment longer, then got the car in motion, this time without interference. “What is she, hypnotized? Whatever you’re doing with her, I don’t like it. She’s going home.”

“Joe, don’t.” Judy’s voice was intense but calm. “I’m all right. If you love Kate, you’ll help to find her brother.”

Joe glanced into the rear-view mirror. Judy’s eyes were open again and she looked quite normal.

She said: “Do you think the police are ever going to find him? They don’t have a single real clue, do they?”

They had reached the plowed section of the cemetery roads by now. The gate was only a quarter mile or so ahead. Joe said: “If you want the truth, I don’t think they’ll ever get him back alive.”

“There you are. But we can. He’s in a white house, out in the country just a few miles west of here. I think the roof has shingles.”

“I think you better go home.”

“If you try to take me home I’ll jump out of the car before we get there. I’ll fight and scream. If you humor me a little I’ll be just fine.”

Joe slowed, indecisively. Half angry, half pleading for help, he turned to the old man. “Doctor?”

Corday’s face was altered by a smile, small, confident, and almost irresistibly comradely. Softly he said: “Turn west.”