An Old Friend of the Family

SEVEN

The visitor stood alone in a dark room, halfway along a broad, terrazo-floored aisle that was lined on both sides with double tiers of massive metal drawers. In the next room, the possessor of a pair of middle-aged lungs was sitting in a slightly squeaky chair, sitting quite still and on the verge of snoring. The light coming under the closed door from the room where the watchman dozed was all that the visitor had to let him see the tags on the drawers, but it was more light than he needed. What handicapped him in his search was not darkness but the impenetrable official jargon on the tags, labels for this foreign city’s mysterious dead. Presently, with an almost inaudible hiss of relief, he gave up trying to be methodical—never his strong suit anyway—and slid a long drawer out at random.

The sheet-draped body in it was that of an adolescent black male whose forehead had been grossly damaged, the rest of the face less so, by some violent flat impact. Automobile, pavement, weapon? Touching the dark marble shoulder, the visitor still could not be sure of which. But the physical contact established for him some rapport. Not only with this one truncated identity, but, by some dimly perceived extension of the contiguity, with all the silent company about.

That was a start. The old man slid the young black statue back out of sight and stood with closed eyes in the near-dark, concentrating deeply. Now he began to pace along the aisle, brushing his long fingers on the cold handles of the drawers. Top row, bottom row, top again . . . he knew without pulling them open that in one was a woman, somewhat too old to be the girl he wanted, in the next, a man, another man, a boy, a girl . . . .

Even before the chosen drawer flowed out on easy rollers at his touch, he was quite sure that he had found Kate Southerland. His hand went out to delicately turn back the rim of coarse white sheet from the face of Judy’s sister.

The revealed face froze him into immobility.

For the second time in as many hours he found himself taken completely by surprise. All his delicately forming plans, estimations, guesses, regarding the Southerland affair, every theory that he had begun to play with in his mind, all vanished like the rising mist at dawn.

This was not true death before him.

Oh, the girl was cold and unbreathing certainly, her heart as quiet as her hands: medical student and expert pathologist alike would certify her dead. But the old man was able to perceive the energies of altered life that still charged all this pretty body’s cells. Again he drew a minimal breath, and uttered that faint, almost reptilian sound, expressing to himself his own surprise. Had she enemies so bitter that they meant her to be autopsied alive?

Or . . .

He passed his flat, extended hand once close above the girl’s face, forehead to chin. Then he made the same motion in reverse. He needed only the one pass to make Kate’s eyes open for him. They were unseeing as yet, but a lovely milk-blue, glass-blue, in the night.

It was important to know whether there had been any attempt at autopsy as yet, and impersonally he drew the sheet down farther. The virginally flat belly was marked by no incision. Good.

With doctorly gentleness he drew the sheet up to just below Kate’s chin. Then he pressed with two fingers on her cheek to turn her head. As he did so he murmured tremendously old words, in a language that could find keys of understanding within the inner levels of almost every human mind. The rigor of Kate’s muscles eased somewhat. Her head turned, her eyelids drooped again, and simultaneously she smiled. What did you tell me, old man? Something nice.

He smiled too, for a moment, seeing a trace of Mina’s lineage before him in the smooth generous forehead and lips. Oh, this was Judy’s sister, yes, though older, blonder and blander, and by his own standards not so beautiful.

The expert pathologist would almost certainly never have thought of looking for the marks which the old man, knowing just where to look, could now observe upon the throat. A pair of less-than-pinprick wounds, now almost closed. By their spacing he knew that a wide human jaw had bitten there.

Next, with one finger the old man parted Kate’s cold lips and explored her teeth. The four cuspids all responded somewhat like erectile tissue to his touch; what had once been inert enamel sharpening visibly.

He pressed her hand. “Look at me, Kate!” No more than a whisper was his voice, and yet a fierce command. And when her milk-blue, innocent eyes turned toward him he bent a little, whispering more intently still: “Who is your secret lover?”

Kate’s smile failed, and a tremor ran through her upper body. To give the required answer meant drawing breath for speech, and breath to her was no more an automatic reflex. After a moment of awkward agony her lungs worked once, and she got out one word: “No—”

No secret vampire lover, it would seem, had left her in this state. Some vampire rapist, then. The old man’s whisper lost its gentle undertone, came out between thin lips as though from a machine: “Who forced himself upon you, then?”

A difficult gasping. “Enoch . . . Winter . . .”

The name meant nothing to the old man. “How long have you known him?”

“Just . . . met . . .”

“He bit at your throat; I can see that for myself. Forced you to taste his blood as well, perhaps?” Otherwise it was unlikely that a single mating would have brought about her transformation.

Ugly remembrance dawned in Kate’s dull eyes; she answered with a soundless yes. Her rib cage labored, but pumped little air. It was not surprising that her strength was low; the newborn vampire could be as weak, though hardly as fragile, as the infant newborn in the breathing phase of life. The visitor squeezed Kate’s hand as he had squeezed Clarissa’s, and made himself smile reassuringly. “I am an old friend of your grandmother’s, Kate. Only one more question now, and you may sleep again. Where is John?”

“John . . .”

Now even the old man needed his best efforts to hear her. “Your brother. Is he with Enoch Winter?”

A faint line of puzzlement creased Kate’s otherwise flawless forehead. He got the impression that she knew nothing of her brother’s fate.

“All will be well now, Kate. Rest, sleep, until I come for you. Answer no call but mine. No call but mine. We will have much to talk of, later. But for now, rest.”

And yet her lungs continued laboring to breathe, to get out one more word. He bent lower, intent on hearing.

“—Joe—”

* * *

For six minutes Joe Keogh had been back in the driver’s seat, with engine and heater running, keeping a sharp eye out for the old man and wondering when he should really begin to be alarmed. Now Joe started, with almost the sensation of electric shock repeated. His companion was standing once more beside the car, where he seemed to have reappeared while in the very act of reaching for the door handle. What good would you be in a stakeout? a part of Joe’s mind demanded angrily of himself. And another part answered: I was watching. He just—just—

“I told you you wouldn’t be able to get in,” he said aloud, with irritation, meanwhile reaching across the front seat to flip the doorlatch up.

“You were quite right,” replied Corday in a soothing, almost contrite voice, as he slid in and closed the door. “The attendants were not at all inclined to be helpful. One of them was sleeping at a desk. A most ill-run establishment. Were I in charge, things would be different there.”

Joe sighed, trying to remember if you could see anyone’s desk from outside the front door of the morgue. “I’ll take you back to your motel.”

“If that is out of your way I can easily take a cab.”

Joe shifted into drive and moved out, north on State, then swinging east to get back to the Outer Drive. “No problem, I’m headed back to the north side anyway.” He hadn’t really been headed that far north, but what the hell. Anyway there was something about the old man, in spite of all his oddities—or maybe because of them—that made Joe reluctant to let go of him. An air of hope; maybe that was it. A feeling of purpose, which was more than Joe had been able to get from anyone else around him since Kate’s death. Looking at the ugly situation logically, of course, there wasn’t much to be hopeful or purposeful about—except the chance of recovering Johnny alive, and to Joe that chance looked smaller and smaller as the hours passed.

His companion’s voice, breaking in upon his thoughts, was welcome. “Tell me one more thing, Joe, if you know it. What are the plans for Kate’s burial?”

“As far as I know, no time’s been set. Waiting on the autopsy, which is supposed to be tomorrow. I’m sure she’ll be buried up in Lockwood Cemetery, in the family mausoleum. It’s one of those the really wealthy Chicago families liked to put up around the turn of the century: all marble and as big as a middle-sized house. One of those famous architects designed it, I forget his name.”

“Thank you, Joe. You have been very helpful to me tonight.” It was said so sincerely that it sounded a little odd.

Joe glanced at the once-more shadowed face. “You’ll be coming to the funeral, then.”

“At my age,” the old man said calmly, “it is difficult to know which funerals one will be able to attend.”