An Old Friend of the Family

TWENTY-ONE

Silently, with deliberate strides, the distant figure was pacing toward them.

Poach moved then, with such quickness that for a moment his great bulk seemed an illusion. Before Joe could react, the giant had reached the fireplace, and in an instant the eight-foot wooden spear mounted above it had come down into his hands. Morgan meanwhile backed up slowly, until one hand extended behind her rested on the table’s edge.

For a long moment no one else stirred. Then, with a broken cry, gray-haired Dickon broke out of the group and stumbled into the next room. There he threw himself at the feet of the one approaching, who halted rather than step on him.

“Master!” Dickon cried out. “Master, I have never betrayed you. I would not believe that you were dead.”

“Stand up, fool.” For Joe’s eyes, the face of the speaker was still in darkness. The voice, resonant and commanding, was like Corday’s, and yet unlike. It went on: “This is the new world now, Dickon, have you not heard? Such sniveling ill becomes one who is ready to take his rightful place as a member of the superior race of beings.”

Dickon’s collapse became total. With his face down on the thick carpet, his words fell into muffled howls. The man whose path he had blocked stepped round him, and continued his advance.

The fashion model was next to fall upon her knees. “Vlad Tepes,” she choked out, “we did not know . . . we never believed that you were . . .”

“When have I ever asked for groveling?” the newcomer interrupted. “From any of you?” He took one more step, and Joe could see that he wore Corday’s face—and yet he did not. Like the voice, the face had been transformed. He who was not that old man Joe had known—and yet was—took yet another step. He stopped there, in a position from which he could see Poach and Morgan both.

In Morgan’s left hand, held behind her back as if for support against the table, there had somehow appeared a long knife. In the table lights it looked to Joe as if it had been fashioned blade and all from one piece of some dark and oily wood. Near the fireplace, Poach stood poised like a harpooner with his wooden spear. The bloody mark on his forehead was throbbing now, looking almost raw.

For the moment, the two breathing people in the room were being ignored by everyone else. Joe saw that Kate’s eyes were fixed, calculatingly, on the knife in Morgan’s hand; all right, let Kate do something about that. Joe’s left hand moved out stealthily over the surface of the table in front of him. His fingers touched and picked up a stub of pencil. If only it were not too big around—

“Watch out!” he yelled, and heard Kate’s voice ring out in chorus with his own.

Had their warning been needed, it would have come too late, for Morgan’s swift strike had taken them both by surprise. The old man had been ready, though. He was out of the path of the knife-blow when it arrived, and with a whiplash of his arm he slapped Morgan staggering back. Joe saw him vanish then. Poach’s lunge with the spear found only air.

An explosion of frightened voices filled the room. All around, solid bodies were going out like candle flames. There was a howling exodus in the air. Joe had drawn his gun at last, and now he got himself in front of Poach. The giant was looking past Joe, holding the spear ready, seeking for Corday. Joe slid the pencil stub eraser-first down the snub barrel of the .38, felt it check in place, rubber against chambered load.

Poach’s eyes widened, discovering something behind Joe. Keeping the spear for bigger game, Poach lifted a free hand to sweep the irritation of a mere armed policeman from his path.

The revolver blasted once, and Joe’s mind registered that at least it had not blown up in his hand with a jammed barrel. The hammerblow of the wooden impact slammed Poach’s head backward, one side of his forehead disappearing in a great smear of jellied blood. The spear fell from the giant’s hands, and the roar he uttered drowned out other shouting voices.

Though staggered, Poach somehow kept his feet. A second later, one eye showing clear and horrible in a face half masked in gore, he was coming after Joe.

Joe stumbled backward. With eyes and mind and hands he scrambled to locate some possible weapon made of wood. The table was too big for him to lift. He crawled beneath it, but a moment later it was knocked away. Lights went smash. In the deeper darkness, screaming and rushing seemed to go on without end. Joe, on his back, despairing of reaching useful wood, raised his pistol toward the huge form that bent toward him with hands outstretched to grab.

A different kind of rush went past him in the air, as of a grazing blow. Something struck Poach with disembodied but elemental power, lifting him to his feet. Joe could feel the floor vibrate when the big body struck the wall.

Automatically holstering his gun, Joe got to hands and knees and crawled toward the fireplace. Sparks were visible there, and there were streaks of luminosity in the air, screaming, fluttering gigantic shapes and shadows. One went right up the chimney with a shriek. A panic, as of whipped animals unable to break out of a pen, filled the place like fog. Joe groped his way amid crazy smashings, outcries, smells unlike anything he had encountered in his life before. What was he doing? Yes, looking for the spear. But he couldn’t find it.

Turning away from the fireplace, he saw Kate. She was halfway across the room, trying to hold on to Morgan.

Joe charged, in mid-stride grabbing up a wooden chair.

He swung the chair with all his strength. It cut through empty air as Morgan’s figure disappeared.

The chair landed on the floor, as Kate almost fell into his arms. Both of them were swaying with exhaustion. The darkened apartment was quiet now. They were alone.

Joe gripped Kate, looked hard at her while she looked back. He started twice to try to speak.

“We’ll talk later,” Kate said at last.

He nodded. “Let’s get out of here.”

Now, with a moment in which to look for it clear-headedly, he found the spear without difficulty. Kate, thinking along with him, had already picked up Morgan’s wooden knife from where it lay on the floor.

They went out the front door of the apartment, at the bottom of a carpeted stair going down beside the elevator. Joe led the way, spear ready. It was a simple door that opened to the sidewalk—

Or to where the sidewalk was supposed to be. Joe had to push the door hard to make it open, and at first the knee-deep snow that had blocked it from outside seemed to him only one more artifact of the evil nightmare from which he and Kate were trying to fight free.

The night air was clear, the snowfall stopped at last. A keen wind was busy drifting whiteness over buried streets, impassable to cars. The old man, standing where the curb should be with his hands in his topcoat pockets, was gazing over a half-buried auto toward the other end of the street. There, almost directly under a bright streetlamp, a pair of figures waited, looking back at him. Morgan in her torn party suit, her cloud of red hair blowing free, looked tiny beside the giant man in evening dress, with the half-ruined face.

The old man did not turn to look at Joe or Kate when they came out of the building behind him. But he said to them calmly: “They will not fly now, or change their form. My hand is on them.” He raised his voice. “Morgan, you see that my allies have not deserted me. Where are yours?”

Whether in answer to him or not, the woman across the street tilted back her beautiful face to the invisible sky above the electric lights. Then from her throat there burst a long, keen, eerie cry. It echoed away among the dark and lifeless buildings, above the brilliant snow, and was followed by deep silence. Joe, listening, could not recall such quiet in the city at any time of day or night. Far away somewhere, diesels were laboring, doubtless either plowing snow or dragging emergency loads through it. Poach was listening too, turning his raised face this way and that. Already his fresh wound was healing. Both of Poach’s eyes were open again, and the blood that covered one side of his forehead was congealed in the frigid air.

At last Morgan lowered her gaze again to the old man. She shrugged. “If you can gather them in, from the four winds, they will doubtless be your allies now—for as long as you seem to be winning. Much good may they do you. Cowards, one and all. Gods, is it long life itself that makes so many of us cowards?”

Corday said: “The one who stands beside you has not yet lived a century. Yet he was cowardly enough to attack me in my earth.”

“Oh, now we are to have considerations of honor.” Morgan shook her windblown hair. “But then with you it is always honor, is it not?” She waited a moment, then added quietly: “We are going to walk away now, Vlad. You have won.”

The old man made no reply. Morgan looked at him a few seconds longer, then turned away and began to walk. Poach, after a last wary glance, followed. Trudging through the deep snow to the nearest street corner, Morgan looked weary as some laboring woman struggling to get home. She turned there, with difficulty heading east into the wind. Poach lurched along beside her.

The old man took his hands out of his pockets and with each hand motioned one of his companions forward. He still had not taken his eyes off his foe. He walked ahead of Joe and Kate, keeping the distance between himself and his enemies nearly constant. The deep snow made hard walking. Joe wondered how long he and Kate were going to be able to keep up. The going was a little easier when they got to where Morgan and Poach had broken trail.

After leading them east through untrodden drifts for half a block, Morgan stopped and turned under another streetlight. “Drive us into a corner,” she called back, “and it will be at your own peril.”

Corday had stopped also, and once more waited with hands in topcoat pockets. “Alas,” he called back cheerfully, “to our greater peril if we do not.”

“Yours, perhaps,” Morgan answered. “I speak now to the others. Joe? Kate? He is as cunning as the Evil One himself. Don’t you understand that if he is the survivor, he must kill you at the end? You know too much about him now, for him to let you live. Kate, he has already killed your grandmother tonight.”

“And you?” Kate called back. “Liar. What will you do with us—refresh yourselves?”

“You do not matter to us, fools. We only meant to frighten you—you will be left in peace forever, but only if you turn around and go home now.”

“This is the way I’m going,” Joe told her. He took a step forward, his grip tightening on the spear.

Morgan looked at them all again, one after another, then once more turned and walked away. Poach kept at her side, walking unsteadily. At once the old man followed them, and Joe and Kate kept pace. Presently, under a blaze of neon from the windows of an otherwise lifeless tavern, Joe noticed occasional red-brown drops spattering the snow.

At the next cross street, Joe could see other people struggling along on foot a block and a half away—perhaps trying to get home, or to get away from home, or to find a doctor or an open liquor store. With sunrise the city, still crippled but aroused, would begin to live again and painfully try to move. Then how would the chase go?

Morgan turned north. Holy Name Cathedral appeared ahead, slowly fell behind as they walked past it. Would there be an early Mass this morning? Involuntarily Joe glanced at Corday’s profile, then up at the stone cross. The old man’s attention was not distracted from his enemies. He did not even appear to blink.

Suddenly the going was easy. They had come to a long stretch of sidewalk blown almost clean of snow. Joe and Kate moved up to walk closer at the old man’s sides.

Joe said: “It goes back a long way, doesn’t it? Between you and her.”

“It does, Joe. But all things must end.”

“I heard Poach saying something tonight . . . that he killed Granny Clare.”

“He did.” The old man paced on for several yards before he added: “Judy was at the house also. But she is going to be all right—if we win. Now we must concentrate on the hunt. Our enemies are still deadly dangerous. But dawn is not far off, and it will weaken them.”

“And you too,” said Kate.

“But not my brave allies.” Corday turned a sudden grin to left and right, including both of them. Joe wished to himself that the old man’s face hadn’t looked something like a skull when he did that. Still it had more life in it by far than many faces that were fat with flesh.

Corday went on: “If I should be destroyed in sunlight, and they survive, still they will be weakened. And forced to remain in human form until night falls again. So if I fall, you must kill both of them today at any cost. But I have survived many such wintry northern mornings, and afternoons as well—ah, they turn east again.”

The distant diesels, or another squadron of them, could be heard again, a trifle louder now. Among tall buildings Joe could not be sure from which direction the sound came. Nearer at hand another noise was growing rapidly; a helicopter’s rotors beat the invisible sky. Only a set of red and green running lights were visible as the machine darted past almost directly overhead.

The streets through which Morgan led them were still empty of other people; superb lighting shone on untracked snow. Another block east, thought Joe, and they’d be on Michigan Boulevard. Joe wondered if Morgan had a goal in mind or was simply fleeing. “They’re sticking close together,” he commented.

“As long as they do,” said the old man, “I have no wish to encounter them without your stout support. Though they are perhaps gaining a little on us now, I think they will run out of gas, as I believe the saying goes, before we do.”

Joe tried to speed it up a little. Police officer needs assistance. It would be a busy day in Communications. All furloughs canceled. Sorry, captain, I just couldn’t make it in, there were these vampires I had to hunt . . .

Kate appeared to be doing fine. She walked with the long wood knife swinging in her hand.

“Corday, I said some things about you before. I’m sorry. What do your friends call you, if it’s any of my business?”

The old man shot him a glance. “Your apology is thankfully accepted. I am comfortable with the name you know me by.”

“Good enough.” Morgan had certainly called the old man something else, something that Joe could not now recall. Well, he certainly wasn’t going to push the question. If any reason other than gratitude were needed, he could well believe that there had been a grain of truth in Morgan’s warning.

They were now gaining slightly on the enemy.

“You are doing excellently,” the old man complimented Joe. He turned to Kate. “And you.”

“I feel fine,” Kate answered. “I wonder a little myself at how good I feel.”

“This fortunate reserve of strength is doubtless a residual benefit of your recent life as a, shall we say, non-breathing human. When the life of your attacker who walks ahead of us is ended, weakness may come upon you temporarily. But then it should be about time for all of us to rest, hey?”

“Is it certain that I’m going to—to stay—this way?”

“It has been my experience that miracles do not reverse themselves. You will remain a breather. As long as that is what you truly want.”

The pursuit emerged abruptly from between buildings onto Michigan Boulevard, as wide as some city blocks were long. Joe had never counted its traffic lanes, but all of them were completely buried now. Here and there cars, trucks, buses were entombed too. There was as yet no sign of snowplow resurrection. On every lamppost were festoons promoting Christmas commerce. The Boulevard was kept free by law from projecting signs of any kind, and the lines of its varied buildings stretched dreamlike to right and left, framing a cathedral aisle of clear snow.

There came a raucous buzz from somewhere, on ground level, nearby, getting closer fast.

Joe was first to identify the sound, and the first to react. Spear ready, he floundered out into the deep snow near the middle of the boulevard, prepared to defend his position there. He called out for help, and Kate and the old man were right behind him.

The snowmobile snarled round a corner behind Joe, and turned speedily in his general direction. Facing Poach and Morgan with his spear leveled, he heard it pass a few yards behind him, going north. Morgan snarled at Joe, but her chance of intercepting and seizing a conveyance had been blocked. There were two people on the vehicle, and one called out something cheery on seeing folk in evening dress out for an early morning romp. The words were lost in the engine noise, and shortly the engine itself was fading in the distance.

After a long pause, Morgan turned silently toward the east side of the street, and once there headed north. Poach kept with her, stumbling more noticeably now. Joe wondered if he might be faking greater injury than he felt.

Above the city’s lights the sky was changing subtly and at intersections Joe could see the sky to the east, above the lake; there it was no longer dark so much as blank. He looked at his wrist watch, but what he saw conveyed no meaning to his worn mind.

Stoplights blinked out an elaborate ritual, timing nothing.

“Do you think they’ll go into a building?” Kate suddenly wondered aloud.

The old man shrugged. “We could follow. They do not really want to seek a general involvement of the breathing world, any more than I do. That would be ultimately bad for all of us. Our branch of the human race has the habit and tradition of settling its own affairs.”

“I just thought,” said Kate, “If they keep going east much farther—”

“Yes?”

“They’ll wind up out on the ice. On the lake. That’s considered very dangerous. When people do that the police sometimes bring out a helicopter and pick them up, right Joe?”

“Ah.”

“Fortunately,” said Joe, puffing steam, “all the copters in the city are going to be very busy today doing other jobs.”

And still Morgan led them north. Going north would also, in time, bring them to the curving shore. Ahead, the gray canyon of buildings in which they moved came to an abrupt end. There, at Oak Street, the Boulevard melded with the Outer Drive and with a delta of lesser arteries. There the park began, and the beach. And, inland, the rank of tall apartment buildings in one of which Craig Walworth lived. “It’s just hit me,” Joe announced. “They’re trying to get to Walworth’s place.”

Corday nodded. “That seems quite probable.”

“You won’t be able to get in there to get at them. If I’m beginning to understand how these things work?”

“Your new understanding is in general correct, I think.” The thin lips smiled faintly. “But I was asked into that apartment a few hours ago.”

“Oh.”

And now they were at Oak Street. The white-shrouded curve of the Drive, for once as silent as a country lane, stretched away to the north under the streetlamps and the altering sky, strewn with abandoned vehicles. The wind off the lake, now dying, had ridged the Drive with snowdrifts. But unlike the Boulevard it was already scrawled with rutted tracks where something had managed to crawl through. The sound of diesels was again a little louder now, and Joe thought he could see a yellow snow-mover laboring far to the north.

Morgan and Poach still headed north, now crossing blank white that had been parkway. East of them lay snow-covered beach, and then a fantasy of ice. Beyond that, more than a hundred yards away, the almost invincibly open water of the lake was leadenly visible under the changing eastern sky.

When she had gone another block north, Morgan came to an abrupt stop. She stood there looked ahead and inland, to where apartment buildings rose above barren trees. Joe realized that Walworth’s building had just come into full view. One window of it, about twenty stories up, was leaking interior light of a different tone than the light from other windows near it. In a moment he realized that the glass of that window must be gone—those windows were not made for ordinary opening. Looking at the ground below it now, Joe could make out human figures, beaming flashlights at one another and on an object lying in the snow. Some of the tiny figures were wearing caps and jackets of police blue. A black face showed between an orange ski cap and a brown civilian coat. Joe had seen that cap before; at this distance Charley Snider’s features were unrecognizable, but fortunately distance worked both ways. An olive-drab halftrack with a red cross on its side, something borrowed from the armory, stood by with its headlights helping to illuminate the scene.

Morgan and Poach were standing still in conference. Now the giant raised an arm to point eastward at the approaching dawn. The desert of water and ice in that direction was becoming gradually more visible. The pale, still sunless sky above it was generally clear. Now the two turned and walked in that direction, not looking back.

At once the old man moved to follow, almost at a trot. Joe and Kate were gasping with the effort of staying at his heels. Joe foundered across a snow fence, only the top two inches of its ineffectual slats showing above curved powder.

Beyond the snow fence, forty yards of unbroken white ended in a jumble of foot-thick ice slabs, broken up and cast ashore by yesterday’s or last night’s powerful east winds. As Joe drew near the wilderness of ice its jagged horizon reached higher than his head. Above the ice beautiful streaks of pink were being born in the southeast sky.

First Morgan and then Poach vanished, this time in something like a normal human way, climbing into the cold maze of broken ice. Corday paused for an instant in his pursuit to ask: “Will it be possible for them to find a boat of any kind?”

“Not here. Not in the winter.” Legs laboring, lungs pumping on frozen air, Joe labored after Corday’s effortless, snow-plowing sprint, holding his spear at the ready, like a slow pole-vaulter, thanking God he had at least found gloves in his jacket pockets.

Following Corday’s gestures, his allies spread out to his left and right, then followed his advance into the ice field. Joe had the worst of it, handicapped with the spear when two hands as well as two feet seemed hardly enough for clambering among the jumbled, slippery slabs.

Trying to keep Corday’s head at least intermittently in sight, Joe advanced as best he could. The sky was light enough now to let him see what he was doing, but still the going was very awkward and treacherous. Moving silently was impossible, at least for Joe.

In a minute or so the whole city behind him was out of sight. Here it was as silent as Alaska, except for the sounds of his own progress. And, somewhere that could not be very far away, a gentle lapping of water against ice or rock or sand.

Joe lost Corday for a little while. Then, dragging himself up into a saddle between two cakes, he was relieved to see the old man’s head and shoulders against a third, still and silent as the ice he rested on. He’s probably letting me draw the first attack, Joe suddenly realized. The clumsy, noisy one . . . well, if that’s the way we have to do it, it still has to be done. He gripped his spear and went ahead.

In a moment he had slipped on impossible footing, skinning a knee painfully inside his trousers and wrenching an ankle, fortunately not hard enough to cut down on his mobility any further. Joe cursed silently and gripped his spear and went ahead. When he got close to the place where he had last seen Corday, the chuckle of water was much closer too. It sounded like it might be eating at the ice right beneath his feet. If a man were to fall into one of these deep, dark blue holes . . .

Here was where Corday had been. But the old man was gone now. He and Kate must be nearby, following, listening even as the enemy were to Joe’s clumsy progress. On the other hand he could imagine the whole chase gradually progressing away from him, and he, the dull-sensed one, falling and freeze-drowning here and never knowing its result. Someone would find him in the spring . . .

Ahead, around the corner of another tilted green-gray slab, an object of a different nature came into view. It took Joe a moment to recognize the tilt-topped mass of a concrete breakwater, draped as it was with smooth curves of ice. A few hours ago, great roaring breakers must have beaten on it. Deep water was nearby, then, underneath the ice-jam.

There was a small sound like a sigh, and from the top of an almost level lintel of ice at Joe’s right the enormous form of Poach came leaping down at him from ambush. Joe got the spear around barely in time. The needle point of it made wooden contact, hooking Poach’s dinner jacket and perhaps his ribs beneath. At the same moment, a woman screamed nearby and Corday shouted something.

The butt of the spear was jammed down against ice by Poach’s weight on top. It rotated then, deflecting him in his leap to land with what ought to have been deadly impact, on concrete sheathed in ice. A sound like a drumbeat was driven from his open mouth. The barbs of the spearpoint tore free. Poach slid from the breakwater into black open water just beneath.

For a moment he was gone. Then he surfaced at Joe’s feet, mouth roaring water and air mixed, his eyes fixed on Joe. His huge hands scrabbled for a grip on ice or spear or enemy.

Groaning as if with his own death, Joe forced the barbed spear home once more. This time it went straight into the giant’s throat. But Poach’s long arm shot forward. His hand locked on Joe’s arm farthest forward on the spear shaft. They were going to go down together. Joe’s feet were slipping on the ice.

Someone seized him from behind, just as he was being dragged to watery death. A thin arm round his waist supported him. He could not turn his head. A wave washed at Poach, and suddenly most of the exposed flesh of Poach’s hands and face was gone. The next wave seemed to knock apart the bones of skull and fingers—Joe could hear them hissing, see them dissolving, as if the water were purest acid.

It was over. Even the clothing had gone down. The spear was bobbing in the water. Joe found his footing and shakily stood up straight. Turning, he met Kate’s eyes. He started to ask: “Where’s—”

Kate uttered a horrible little cry and struck at something on his arm. Poach’s skeletal right hand dropped off, bones shattering when it hit the ice. The first direct rays of sun were on the still-moving bones now. Joe watched them crumble into dust, and then to nothingness.

“Where’s Corday, Kate?”

“This way. He sent me to help you.”

Scrambling after Kate around a monolith of ice, he came upon the old man and Morgan in its shadow. The two of them looked almost like lovers seeking privacy. But Corday had the long wooden knife in one hand now, and his other hand held both of Morgan’s wrists tightly behind her.

She was looking into the distant sky. Her eyes and face might have been carved from the slab she leaned against. Corday turned to the two breathing people. “It is over. You may leave us now.” When they did not go he added: “What would you have me do? Do you want to sentence her to one of your prisons for her crimes? Leave us.”

But when they had turned away he called: “Wait. Tell—tell those who know me, that I shall be all right. That I am going home.”

Joe took Kate’s arm. Suddenly she was leaning against him weakly. It would be a struggle to get back to where they could call for help, but they would make it.

Behind them a woman screamed loudly, once. That name, again.