Fatal Bargain Read online

  Randy’s insides knotted with rage. Nothing could be worse than being dismissed. If Bobby and Zach had not turned their backs…

  But they had.

  And so Randy turned his back as well, and left the room — although it was his house; he had the best home theater of any teenager in town. In his heart he knew that was why Bobby and Zach hung out with him — for the electronics he provided. Randy went to the telephone.

  The rage percolated into courage, and he made three phone calls.

  Phone calls he would never have made under normal circumstances.

  But he was showing off.

  And it seemed reasonable at the time…

  …Randy stared at the vampire. It was becoming clear why this mansion had been sold so often.

  Lacey did not know that anybody was referring to her as an airhead. She happened to despise Bobby and Zachary, the most conceited idiots in the entire high school, but although Lacey had a strong personality, she would not have been able to laugh it off. Being called an airhead by two such popular boys would hurt.

  Lacey had never had a boyfriend before Randy.

  Randy made her nervous and unsure, and dating made her very nervous and very unsure. But she wanted to participate; she wanted to be doing what all the songs on all the radio stations said you should be doing — falling in love.

  She didn’t really love Randy, but she was trying.

  She stuffed her head full of love-thoughts, and sat in love-postures, and listened to love-music.

  It didn’t take.

  Randy was just a nice ordinary kid, half twerp and half jock. He was growing in all directions at once, both mentally and physically, and it was hard to keep track of Randy, or know if she even wanted to. She was fond of him, but mostly she was fond of going out.

  Lacey felt very guilty about this.

  Should you go out with a boy just in order to leave the house and be seen in other places? This seemed mean and low-minded. Lacey was a nice girl and didn’t want to be mean or low-minded.

  And yet, Randy kept calling her. He must be happy.

  On that crucial night a week ago, Lacey had been half hoping he would call. Strange the way a telephone could rule your existence. It had become her center of gravity; she rotated around it like a moon around a planet.

  And I don’t even love Randy, she thought. I wonder what it’s like when you really do love the boy.

  She dreamed of love, of the boy she would meet one day, when stars and rockets and fireworks would fill her mind and soul and body.

  And when the phone finally did ring, and it was Randy, she felt so guilty for dreaming about somebody better that she was ready to do anything Randy asked.

  It took some serious planning to be able to arrange for a Saturday night without parental knowledge of her whereabouts. Lacey was always hearing about unsupervised teens whose parents hadn’t seen them in days and didn’t care where they were or what they were doing, but she, personally, had never encountered such a parent. All the parents she knew foamed at the mouth and confiscated car keys if anybody vanished for even an hour.

  It was agreed that Lacey would say she was at Roxanne’s and Roxanne would say she was at Sherree’s. If there were phone calls from parents, they all had their cell phones and could fake it, and nobody would get in trouble.

  Lacey had never been in trouble, or even close to trouble, and found herself strangely attracted to the idea. But if they checked on her, she would be in the Mall House and they would never know.

  Lacey’s family lived on the far side of town and usually didn’t have occasion to drive on this road. Her mother was not of the shop-till-you-drop persuasion and would not have kept up to date on the possibility of a new mall going up where once a decrepit house had stood.

  Nobody had called it the Mall House when it still had a family living there.

  It got the name Mall House when the zoning committee decreed that nobody could rip the place down because it was a “Historic Building” and the would-be builders said, “No, it’s a piece of junk.” For months people argued the pros and cons of this situation, and the old boarded-up mansion had gotten its nickname.

  Wrong nickname, thought Lacey. It’s the Vampire House.

  The vampire sifted slowly out of sight. Not because he left, but because he ceased to be. She felt his molecules still drifting around the room, like an evaporating perfume. She did not even want to breathe, for fear that vampire threads would clog her lungs.

  Sherree had never had a phone call from Randy before. She had to stop and think who on earth this could be. Randy, she had pondered. Do I know a Randy?

  Luckily Randy expected her to be confused and he added, “You know. Bobby’s friend. You came to my house to see a movie last month.”

  “Ooooh, yes! You have that fabulous media room, with the carpeted levels and the big soft floor pillows and the little kitchenette full of snacks and sodas right downstairs. I never saw a TV that big in somebody’s house! Sure, I remember your house, Randy.”

  Sherree did not hear her own sentence. (She never did quite hear what she was saying out loud.) She did not realize how hurtful it was to be told your TV room was easier to remember than you were.

  “A sleepover?” said Sherree dubiously. “I don’t know, Randy. My parents are pretty strict.”

  She paid attention to his offer because she paid close attention to anything a boy said. Sherree did not believe there was much worth thinking about except boys. Luckily there were so many of them. Sherree knew perfectly well that Bobby was dating Roxanne at the same time, but Sherree had learned that what boys wanted most was what other boys already had. Going with Bobby was increasing Sherree’s desirability, and pretty soon Sherree would extricate herself from Bobby and take advantage of the boys who envied him. She had pretty well decided to wait until after Christmas because a girl who had dated Bobby last year said that Bobby was really a big spender in December.

  Sherree could not bring Randy’s face to mind. Normally her brain was like a huge yearbook of available boys. Why hadn’t she registered Randy? Was there something wrong with him, or had the rented movies been especially good?

  Randy wanted Sherree to pretend that she was really spending the night at a girlfriend’s house, but he would pick her up and they were going to stay in a haunted house. Bobby and Zach would be there, too.

  “A haunted house?” said Sherree. “Give me a break, Randy.” Randy plowed on. The house, he insisted, really was haunted. That was why they were ripping it down. Not because they were going to build a mall there but because of the terrible things that had happened to the human beings who had lived in that house, listened to those banging shutters, climbed those creaking stairs.

  “Well…” said Sherree.

  “We’ll have fun,” said Randy. “I’ll bring the food.”

  “And movies?” said Sherree. “I love movies.”

  (Randy had just told Sherree that the house didn’t have electricity anymore, but apparently Sherree had drawn no conclusion from this. Perhaps she thought Randy traveled with his own generator.) He said they would have so much fun that they wouldn’t need movies. “In fact,” Randy said, “I’ll bring along a video camera and film us! We’ll be the movie!”

  “Well…” said Sherree. “Are there going to be other girls?”

  “Of course. Lacey’s coming, for one.”

  Sherree couldn’t remember Lacey, either. Randy patiently described Lacey and after she had heard the description three times, Sherree felt as if she knew Lacey after all. “Oh, right,” said Sherree. “Sure. Lacey. Great.”

  “Now we don’t want lots of people there,” warned Randy. “Spoil the fun, you know. So don’t tell anybody.”

  “I won’t tell anybody,” promised Sherree. She hung up feeling confused. She did not know why they were going to the haunted house, nor quite what they would do once they sneaked in, but Randy seemed very sure of himself.

  Sherree wondered what to wear to an even
t like this. She stood quite happily in front of her closets and bureau drawers, matching and re-matching, thinking maybe she would call this Lacey to see what she was wearing.

  The only kind of movie for which Sherree did not have a taste was horror. She never watched those. They were too scary. She could not sleep at night after a horror movie, and if she ever managed to get to bed she had to sleep in a fetal position because she was afraid of what would happen to her toes if they stuck out.

  Sherree was wearing sandals and her toes stuck out.

  But even without the information she might have gotten from late-night movies, Sherree knew that she did not have to worry about her toes.

  The vampire’s attention was elsewhere.

  And his teeth — his teeth seemed to be everywhere.

  They slid in and out of focus, as if lenses on cameras had fogged up.

  Sherree tightened herself into a ball, thinking: Lacey’s standing up. He’ll take her first. I’ll run. He can’t do two at once.

  When the phone rang that night, and it was Randy, Roxanne bit back a laugh. If there was anybody who did not make waves, who did not set trends, and who was not interesting, it was poor Randy. He was the classic case of the kid with the terrific car, the terrific media room, and unlimited use of credit cards. People hung out with him to use him, and Randy had no idea.

  Roxanne could not imagine what Randy was talking about, wanting to have a party in a deserted house. Roxanne being Roxanne, she pointed out the flaws in his planning: how they would have to break in, which was illegal; how the police might be called by neighbors; how very possibly the house was structurally unsound and they might fall through a stair tread or otherwise hurt themselves. How, assuming they did get in, a dark house might be interesting for a minute or two, but then what were they going to do?

  “Lighten up, Roxanne,” said Randy. “There are no neighbors, and back when they built that house, they built ʼem to last for centuries. Nothing’s broken in there.”

  “The shutters are,” Roxanne pointed out. “It gives me the creeps just to drive by. Especially now, with everything around the place leveled.”

  The house stuck out of the ground as if it were a growth or a mold. Strange twisted lightning rods stabbed the sky from the peaks of the porch roof and the ugly tower. Bulldozers had razed everything around it, even pulling down the immense dark hedge of towering hemlocks, but the downed trees had never been hauled off. They lay on the ground, dead and brown, a barricade of scaly bark and rotting limbs.

  “But what’s the point?” said Roxanne. Roxanne’s life was filled with master plans. She did not like to undertake anything unless there was a good result from it.

  “Something to do,” said Randy.

  Roxanne’s calendar was very full. She did not need “something to do.” She was willing to rearrange her schedule only if it were something worthwhile to do. “But what will we do once we’re there?” said Roxanne.

  “I’m not telling yet,” said Randy.

  Roxanne wondered if this was because he had no idea yet.

  “I’m just promising,” said Randy, “that it’ll be a night to end all nights.”

  And that was a tempting phrase. Roxanne even agreed to help Lacey lie to her parents, although Lacey was about as interesting to Roxanne as dust under the bed. Even after she found out Sherree was going, too, Roxanne stuck with it. It would be an amusing test of Bobby’s social abilities: Could he juggle two girls at once? In front of his two skeptical male friends? If the other guests had been people who mattered deeply to Roxanne, perhaps she would not have risked it. But even Bobby had ceased to be at the top of her list. It was her senior year and she was ready to shrug off these younger kids and get back to what counted.

  Roxanne looked around the tower.

  She looked at the swirling cloak as it waited to learn which human body would be encapsulated within it.

  She looked at the five teenagers trapped with her.

  One of us must be sacrificed, she thought. One of us has to spend the night with a vampire.

  Well, it won’t be me.

  Chapter 3

  ZACH WAS HAVING DIFFICULTY pushing the little black lever on his flashlight. He could not seem to make it go forward. His hands were trembling. He, who was always in control of a situation (Zach picked his situations, so he would never be in one he could not control in the first place), could not even control his own fingers.

  Zach had to go back quite a few years to remember being afraid. He was often nervous. Zach had high standards. When he entered a class he did it with style. When he made an introduction, he was amusing. When he told a joke, he timed the punch line just right. When he took an exam, he got 95. When he went to a party, he was the life of it. He rehearsed all these events; he actually practiced room-entering, sauntering offstage, tie tying, laughing cruelly versus laughing gently. And because it mattered so much to him that he got these details right, Zach was accustomed to being nervous.

  But afraid?

  Zach frowned, remembering. He had probably been five, because he easily pictured his Halloween costume: He was Superman in a big red cape his older sisters had worn before him, but he had gotten separated from the group and found himself in a black yard with evilly grinning pumpkins, and a skeleton swinging from a tree, and spiders cascading off a gutter.

  With abject terror he had fallen to the ground. He had not even been brave enough to run. He had not even screamed. He had just collapsed, a little puddle of panic.

  He had refused ever again to be a little puddle of panic.

  Zach controlled his fingers. He got the flashlight on. He moved its rays in a circle around the tower. The light revealed five terrified faces. Nobody was screaming, nobody was even running. They were little puddles of panic.

  The vampire was not visible. Either the vampire had told the truth when he said he was not going to stay while they made the decision, or he was composed of a material that did not shine in the dark.

  We shouldn’t have come up here, Zach thought, furious with himself for making this error. If we’d stayed downstairs…

  Well, they hadn’t.

  Zach was having some difficulty planning a strategy. It seemed to take so much more of his energy to hold the flashlight still than this minor physical action should require. His heart was pounding so hard that he did not seem to have much left over for running and escaping.

  For the first time, Zach wished he were a jock like Bobby.

  Bobby trained for this kind of stuff. All that bench-pressing and lap-running — now it would pay off. Whereas studying for British literature exams — that would get Zach precious little distance from a vampire.

  Zach focused the shaft of light on the single, open door. Stairs led down to a broad landing on the bedroom floor below the tower, twisted once, and then led down to the old front hall. The teenagers had not, of course, come in the front door. Standing on the old creaking porch, they had peeled back a large slab of plywood that had been nailed over a broken window in the old dining room. Randy had brought along a clawed hammer to pry up the nails.

  Zach disliked taking risks without rehearsing them first.

  There was quite a bit that could go wrong if he tried to run ahead of the others. Zach flashed the light temptingly out the door and down the tower stairs, hoping one of the others would bolt, and Zach could follow in the wake, let someone else take the risks for him.

  Ever since the vampire had appeared, the tower had been filled with a weird combination of light and dark. There were no lights, and yet Bobby could see himself and the others. The vampire had no color, and no form, and yet Bobby had been able to see him perfectly.

  I possess the door, the vampire had said.

  Bobby had believed it. The mushroom skin, the dripping fangs, the oozing cloak — it could possess anything it wanted.

  But it had evaporated, leaving behind its strange illumination of the tower. And now he believed it less. Even a vampire could not possess
air, and air was all that could fill the door opening.

  Zach leveled the beam of his flashlight on the doorway and Bobby was relieved: The beam passed through the door. If light rays could travel in that space, so could Bobby.

  Bobby planned his route.

  He was a little worried about stumbling on the stairs. He’d been teasing Roxanne and Sherree so much about things that go bump in the night he had paid no attention to the layout of the house. Once he left here, he’d have to move it; there could be no fumbling on this pass.

  Bobby was a player of team sports, but it did not occur to him that perhaps this was a sport and perhaps he had a team with him. He thought only of saving himself as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  Bobby took a running start from the back of the tower room and hurled himself forward.

  Sherree had never been afraid of anything, either. There was no need. The people around Sherree did everything for her.

  Sherree fulfilled the Barbie-doll premise: She was incredibly thin and yet voluptuous. She had masses of fluffy hair and yet none of it ever fell into her oval face. Her blue eyes were immense, and she wore tinted contact lenses to make them bluer. She even dressed like a Barbie doll. No skirt was too short, no top was too glitzy, no tan was too dark.

  Just two weeks ago, her car had stopped working while she was driving along some unknown road. She didn’t wonder what had gone wrong, and she didn’t worry about what to do next. She didn’t even bother to get her cell phone out of her purse. Not too far down the road, she could see an immense sign from some gas station poking up above the tallest trees.

  Sherree strolled up to the garage. Sure enough, the men who worked there came trotting out, eager to rescue her. All she had to do was twinkle at them.

  Twinkling worked.

  Sherree had planned to twinkle through all her problems. But she did not want to twinkle at a vampire. The vampire would want her most, because everybody always did. And she was dressed the skimpiest because Sherree always was.