An Old Friend of the Family

NINETEEN

Kate saw the old man step in through the front door, and in the same instant she heard the pistol fire. Only with that shock did her mind grow fully clear. If the old man had really needed help, she would have been too late to help him. As it was, she sprang forward with a speed and strength that she had not known she possessed, reaching past Craig’s shoulder to knock down his joined hands with the weapon still clasped in them. The force of the movement knocked Craig to his knees.

The old man smiled reassuringly at Kate. Then calmly bending with his own fluid and unhurried speed, he caught Craig by the shirt front and lifted him erect again, letting the gun stay somewhere on the floor. Reaching back with his free hand, Corday pushed the door shut behind him. Then he gently questioned both of the people with him: “Where is Joe?”

“He’s been here,” said Kate. “He’s not here now.”

Craig said: “I’m not gonna take any heat to protect her. Go over to Enchantress Cosmetics. As for Carol.”

“And what does Carol look like?” The question was in a tone of mild interest. Walworth’s strong, young body was swaying, and he seemed to be trying without success to avoid the old man’s eyes. The old man seemed to be keeping the young one propped up with one finger.

“Real good shape,” Walworth muttered. “Sharp dresser. Young. Red hair—”

“Ah? And where is the place you mentioned?”

Walworth named an intersection. “About eight blocks from here, west and south. I gotta warn you about her. She’s really got it in for you.”

“Indeed.”

“And for me too,” Walworth added hastily. “She wants me dead. Just today she drugged me—bad, man, bad. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. I thought you were a friend of hers just now, coming to finish me off. That’s why I . . .”

“Kate has told me,” the old man softly interrupted, “how and where she came to meet them. Johnny has spoken to me of a bearded man driving a car, who asked him for directions.”

Walworth’s hands that had aimed the gun so steadily were shaking now. He couldn’t seem to find anything to say.

Kate could only think of one thing clearly. “Please,” she broke in, talking to the old man. “I can help you now. I’m all right. Let’s go find Joe. He’s in real trouble.”

Still holding Walworth almost tenderly with one thin hand, the old man turned thoughtful eyes to Kate. “Go to the location this man has just given us,” he ordered. “I shall follow presently.” When Kate hesitated, he repeated firmly: “Go.”

Kate nodded, turned, and fled toward the kitchen. There was no sound of the back door being opened, but Walworth knew that she was gone.

He asked: “You gonna call in the cops on me?”

“No,” the old man assured him gently.

“You’re not really here anyway, are you?” Walworth asked him, shivering. “I could almost wish you were.”

* * *

At the mausoleum the old man had shown Kate something of how to use her recently acquired powers. How the night change in her body would enable her to pass like smoke through locked and bolted doors. The kitchen door went past her like some vague and insubstantial curtain, but this time she had hardly thought about the process. As she started down the back stairs of the apartment building, all her mental energies were concentrated on the job of finding Joe.

The back stairs were concrete and steel, designed as an interior fire escape as well as a service passage. Not until Kate had descended past two landings did she come to a small window. At once she used her marvelous new agility to leap up upon its narrow inside sill. Once she had located the knife-edge crevice where reinforced glass met metal frame, the closed window was no obstacle to her passage.

In the passing she willed an alteration in the cells of her body, the fabric of her clothes, the very air that filled her lungs and all the spaces in her bones. Outside, her altered body was at one with the wind. Her altered senses blurred. A creature of the air now, and no more solid than the air, she sank through clouds of falling snowflakes. Like blowing snow she skimmed above rooftops, down and up and down again.

Propelling herself by her will, she moved south, and west.

Joe was near.

His danger was terrible, but at least the threat did not seem to be immediate. And fortunately he had not yet been greatly hurt. Kate’s inner senses were keener now than before, but at the same time sight and hearing had grown blurred and dull and indirect with her physical body dispersed to hardly more than mist. She felt rather than saw the glowing streetlights and the bulking buildings of the city below, and anything dimmer or smaller could hardly be perceived at all. In order to reach Joe she was going to have to take on solid form again.

In theory, she knew, the forms of animals were available now for her to put on. But she had as yet tried nothing like that, and at the moment she had no mental energy or time to spare for experimentation. So when she came down with a crunch in rooftop snow, her shape was her own, as human as before. And as her senses grew keen again Kate was at once aware not only of the details of the buildings and the storm around her, but of two other forms that were passing as she had just passed in the air. They were the diffuse bodies of a man and a woman that Kate was almost sure she had never seen before.

Joe was very near, now, but not in the building where Kate had come down. She moved to crouch motionless beside a chimney, while the couple she had just detected materialized in a slow descent out of the beflaked air to another roof only half a block away. The building they came down on was no more than two or three stories high, of concrete gray.

* * *

In the little storeroom there were a couple of fifty-five-gallon steel drums, with clamped-on lids. There were wooden crates and cardboard boxes. It was too dark to see how any of them were labeled. Joe thought that if he could get to his feet he could make an effort to spill one or more of these containers on the chance that they might hold something helpful. A box of knives would seem to be unlikely. Maybe glass to break, to try to get an edge with which to cut his bonds—if he could move his hands enough to pick up anything. Something to start a fire with, to attract help? He hadn’t yet reached the stage where burning himself to death looked like a desirable option.

But it didn’t take long to convince himself that trying to work free of the ropes without some kind of tool was going to be futile. Maybe if they left him here two days unwatched he’d manage it. But by then he would have died of hypothermia, or whatever they called it now. The storeroom wasn’t as cold as the outdoors tonight, but even with his jacket still on he was no longer warm.

The ropes were fixed so he couldn’t stand. He might be able to spill boxes, though. If one of them contained glass, and if the glass broke, that might help—more likely, though, they would just be irritated by his noisiness and come in and twist one of his fingers off.

There was one box on the floor, about as high as a piano bench and as long as a piano, whose lid was slight askew, so that it ought to be possible to see or maybe reach inside. A place to start, something to try. Crabbing his way along the cold concrete as best he could, almost silently, Joe got beside the large crate. Here his face was in reflected streetlight, while the interior of the box remained in heavy shadow; looking in, he could distinguish only vaguely mounded white, about halfway down.

He had to find something to cut his ropes with, the way people were always doing it in stories. Anything.

At once end, the whitish surface inside the box was marked with a dark ring a couple of inches across. Just above that were two glassy spots. . . .

He froze, even the cold-trembling in his limbs suspended for the moment, and in that moment he was afraid that he was going to faint. A dead woman lay there, her staring eyes hardly a foot beneath his own. A young woman dressed in white.

Jesus. Jesus. His back against another crate, Joe slid away from his discovery, trying to keep from blacking out. His arms and legs were throbbing, and at the same time trying to go numb. If he fainted now . . . they hadn’t even taken away his gun. . . .

. . . there were two voices again, somewhere out in the apartment. Joe understood that he was coming out of some kind of blackout. Probably a brief one, for he hadn’t frozen yet, or wet his pants either. Something else to think about . . .

A Chicago cop shouldn’t pass out at the sight of one more dead woman. It made his enemies no worse than before, he’d known what they were like ever since Kate’s body had been found. . . .

Oh, God.

But it wasn’t Kate. Blondish hair, perhaps, but—

In a moment Joe had pushed himself back in position to peer again into the crate, or coffin. Of course it wasn’t her, he would have known at first glance if it had been. He forced himself to gaze into the box, trying to make out details that he had earlier avoided. It wasn’t Kate, even allowing for death’s changes. This woman was smaller, sharper-featured. And something was wrong about her mouth.

Out in the apartment, the two people talking had moved closer to the storeroom door. “You simply left him there,” Carol was saying now. Whoever had been left where, she wasn’t sure whether she liked the idea of it or not.

“He woulda died,” answered the rough voice of Leroy Poach, who had been hanged in Oklahoma in 1934. “No way he would’ve lasted if I’d tried to bring him here. As it is he’s prob’ly finished by now. I think I got him right through one lung. You shoulda seen the blood.”

“Oh, I’d love to fly out there now . . . if I thought I could be there for the end.” Carol’s voice suddenly became a whisper of concentrated hate. “So much effort, so much time. Even you can’t begin to realize . . . and now, to miss the end at last.”

“Take off, then. Enjoy. I’ll talk to the people till you get back. Explain to Lady Wanda when she gets up.”

“No.” Carol was regretfully decisive. “This conference is too important. I must be here for all of it, if I can. I must be unhurried, in control of everything. There must be no doubt in any of their minds that I am now in control. That the future is going to be what I say . . . Poach, what about the Southerland family?”

“They were all out somewhere, except the old woman. I put her out. It don’t look to me like any of the others will get home tonight, the way it’s snowing. If they do, well, they’ll move the old bastard one way or the other, and that’ll be it. Cops’ll buzz around for a while, but the body’ll be gone to nothing before they get a good look at it.”

“Tell me again about the fight. I want to hear it all.”

“Well. I looked in all the closets and everywhere as I went through the house, see? Then I got to this room in back, and I knew right away. There it was, a big stone coffin like the one I found out in the cemetery.”

“It must have been earthenware of some kind, to provide the home earth. Clever. We must remember that for future use ourselves. Go on.”

“Anyway, I just knocked it over and he rolled out on the floor. I got the stake in before he even got his eyes open. That opened his eyes for him! He managed to stand up, and we thrashed around a lot, but it wasn’t really a fight. He didn’t have a chance—right through the chest. Nailed ‘im there like a bug.”

When Carol spoke again her voice was low. “I suppose it was for the best.”

“Suppose?” Poach’s voice did not really show anger; rather it was as if he would have shown anger if he dared. “In the two years since I met you, you been drummin’ it into me, how I gotta kill him quick if I ever get the chance. How dangerous he is. Also how much you hate him. So I thought it worked out just perfect. I got ‘im but I didn’t finish ‘im. I give you the chance.”

“Yes, you did the right thing. You have done very well.”

“You don’t act too happy.”

“Ah, dear Poach, don’t sulk. It is just—can you imagine what it is like, to hate someone for four hundred years? You cannot, you are not yet a century old. After such a length of time, there is something like love in it.”

“Love?” The tone was crude, incredulous. What had been near-anger was near-laughter now.

Carol’s voice lashed at him. “Remember your place, my man. What you were when I found you. What you are and will be still depends on me.”

Poach mumbled something.

“What?”

“Yes, my lady. I didn’t mean. . . .”

“See that you don’t.”

The door to the storeroom opened without warning, and Carol was looking in at him. She was wearing a kind of green jumpsuit now, a fancy party coverall, and she smiled at Joe enchantingly. Then her eyes moved beyond him, just as a faint noise came from that direction.

The dead woman had got out of her box and was standing beside it in her white gown, plainly visible in the brighter light from the apartment. She stretched luxuriously. There were traces of something dried around her lips, and she licked them with a perfectly pink tongue. . . .

* * *

. . . when he could hear the distant voices chattering again, and knew again where he was, he refrained for a long time from opening his eyes. He didn’t want to see the walking dead. He thought about the sensations of numbness in his feet and hands. That he could assess them so carefully meant that he was awake now, didn’t it? Before, he had been drugged. The woman in the box must have been only a drugged dream.

Joe opened his eyes, though, when he heard the door again. It was a smiling Leroy Poach, hanged in 1934, attired now in black evening dress, come to take Joe to the toilet. This prophylactic attention was actually just about in the nick of time.

“Wouldn’t want you to be messy when we bring you out, cop.” Poach was quite jovial now, despite his crusted forehead crease. It looked like a days-old wound, cared for and then forgotten. “Nice and clean and fresh is the idea. You’re gonna be the piece de resis-tahnce at the party tonight. Know what I mean? Not yet you don’t. Wouldn’t believe me if I told you, either.”

While being carried to the bathroom and back he could hear Carol and the other people chatting, off somewhere in other rooms. He could see no one but Poach. The apartment was still mostly in darkness. There were lamps but no one had bothered to turn on more than a very few of them. Rusty water ran into the toilet when it was flushed, as if the fixture hadn’t been used in a long time.

Back alone in his chill room, bound as securely as before, Joe thought he could hear more people arriving. There were more voices, and the voices were getting somewhat louder, as they tended to do at any party. And now Joe imagined that he could hear them talking in Latin. At least he might have called it Latin, if he had been forced to take a guess.

Latin was bad, because it made him remember Johnny. Johnny in his closet, losing fingers. Then reporting the Latin conversations which nobody quite believed. . . .

Somewhere in the outer air, between Joe and the distant streetlight, moved something that was larger and thicker than a snowflake but just as silent as the snow. There was no way that he could see what it had been.

The box that the dead woman had climbed out of was completely open now, lid beside it on the floor. He had been hallucinating. If he looked into that box now, he would see something ordinary. But he wasn’t going to try.

“But, why do we not speak English now?” said Carol’s voice, not far outside the storeroom door. “Some of you in the past have chided me for using the old tongue too much. Poach, I think there are more guests on the roof, go up and ask them in.”

“Thank you,” said a man, not Poach. “English will certainly be more convenient for most of us. I suppose half of us at least have been born on this side of the Atlantic.”

“And many of the rest,” a woman put in, “have been here a hundred years or more. Long enough to forget a great deal of the Old World.” Other voices murmured polite agreement. There was a nervous little female laugh.

Poach was back, saying something. With him came a man and a woman, new arrivals, for various greetings were exchanged. When that was over, Carol talked. She had become a public speaker now, addressing a gathering.

“I trust you have all had a tolerable journey, weather notwithstanding. Let me assure everyone that this storm is perfectly natural, at least as far as I and Poach are concerned. Our whole energies have been directed elsewhere.”

Someone commented: “It’s a great night not to be a breather.” It had the sound of a quoted proverb. Again there was a scattering of nervous laughter.

When this had died, the hostess resumed: “As you know, this meeting was originally called that I might solicit your support in a struggle for our freedom.” She paused. “That, I say, was the original purpose.”

Another pause. The room they were all gathered in was suddenly extremely quiet.

And the shadow in front of Joe’s streetlight was back again. Its presence was continuous now, but it was not still—there was a shapeless outline, shifting with some kind of movement. It was only the snow. What else could it be?

Abruptly Carol’s voice rang out: “Your support in that struggle is no longer necessary, for victory is ours. This afternoon our enemy overreached himself. He attempted to attack Poach in his earth.” This last was delivered as an indictment, made with disgust, as of an offense that was not only criminal but represented some ultimate breach of decency. “That ancient, evil . . . I scarcely know what to call him. That tyrant had evidently been taking his own publicity too seriously. He overestimated his own powers, and underestimated those of Poach.”

A few moments of silence intervened. Then Carol, in a harder voice, continued: “Surely no one here regrets this turn of events?”

Another woman eventually answered. “It is only that we are—surprised.”

Someone else murmured a faint question.

“No, he is not yet dead,” Carol replied. “But he is firmly in my hands, awaiting judgement.”

A man’s voice, stammering a little but with more boldness than any of the others had yet shown, asked: “And who is to sit in judgement on him then? Of what is he accused?”

“Of—what—accused?” Carol whispered back the question as if incapable of believing that it had been asked. “Of what? To begin the catalogue, of attempting to murder Poach—but I can’t believe that you are really serious.”

Another man’s voice put in: “I am older than any here, I think, except yourself, lady. If judgement is to be rendered on a nosferatu, a tribunal of seven is called for by the law. At least five are necessary, if seven cannot be found who—”

Now Carol’s young voice snapped like a whip. “I warn you, I warn you all, things are going to go hard on his secret sympathizers. His crimes are legion. Even the breathers’ histories document them. Do you think he is milder now, less murderous, less oppressive, than he was in the fifteenth century?” She paused. “Some of you, I think, do not yet appreciate the positive aspects of today’s victory. What it is going to mean in terms of freedom for all of us. No more are we to be a powerless minority on the face of the earth, always hunted and in hiding.”

A woman replied tremulously: “I think—I think we will all come to understand it better, in time. Can you explain it to us more fully, Morgan?”

“If necessary.” Carol’s—or Morgan’s—voice went on. “That foul old man has had some of you completely brainwashed for centuries. That must be changed. When I call him old you know I am not speaking of mere spins of the Earth. He has been selfish and unchanging in his thought, blind to all our needs. Insisting that all of us be fettered by what he calls his honor. Not to use the breathers who swarm about us, not to taste their blood unless they give consent. Not to remove those who give us offense or stand in our way. Not to enjoy the treasures of the earth, that by rights belong to us as superior beings . . . but today a new world has been born. All that is changed.”

There was a little silence. The speaker’s voice was bright and confident when it continued. “Have any of you any more questions? Yes. Dickon?”

The pause dragged on before one of the men’s voices dared: “I was only . . . I still think it would be better if we . . .”

“Poach, it seems we have an agent of the old man’s here among us. Place him—”

“No, Morgan! I did not mean to dispute your authority in this. It’s nothing to me, really. He—he whom you call the old man is nothing.”

When Morgan spoke again, her voice had grown even more light and cheerful. “Then enough of business, I think, for the time being. Would any of you care for some refreshment?”

Maybe if a man had to, if there were nothing else, he could break ropes with his arms. Even if his arms were numb. If he really gave it all. . . .