Fatal Bargain Page 8

  Randy had invited to this party nothing but a collection of egos. Selfish, selfish people.

  Roxanne: the selfish achiever.

  Sherree: the selfish beauty.

  Bobby: the selfish jock.

  Zachary: the selfish classy act.

  Randy himself: the selfish hanger-on.

  And Lacey.

  Randy could not believe he had ever let anybody call her an airhead. What was an airhead, anyway? He was. They all were.

  I invited Lacey here, thought Randy. She’s here because I asked her to come.

  How to treat your date, he thought hysterically. Give her the night of her life.

  I offered her, thought Sherree. Those were my words. I nominate Lacey. I cannot live with that.

  I didn’t even argue, thought Roxanne. I would have seconded the motion if the vampire had asked me to.

  I can’t do this, thought Zach. If there’s any test in life, this is it. I can’t fail it. I can’t fail Lacey.

  I’m half the vampire’s anyway, thought Bobby. I should be the one he takes. He’s got some of me anyhow.

  Sherree turned. Bobby turned. Roxanne turned. Zach turned. But they were not the first. Randy had already raced back into the tower. “Stop!” he shouted. “Don’t touch her!”

  Randy flung his arms around Lacey.

  Lacey was untouched. The vampire, after all, had not moved quickly. Why let pleasure evaporate before he had had time to enjoy it fully? Only the cloak had changed position. Only the fangs had lengthened.

  “Take me instead,” said Randy.

  The vampire’s fangs vanished behind his lips. The lips drew into a thin bloodless line and tucked themselves into his face and disappeared.

  Randy was filled with glory and pride. “Take me,” he repeated, and his voice sounded rich and splendid in his own ears. “I dare you.”

  Lacey could have wept.

  Randy. Volunteering to sacrifice himself. Randy, whom she had found the most useless in the group. She did not love him. Perhaps nothing could command the emotion of love. Perhaps love had to arrive on its own. But he had redeemed himself.

  I am all right, she thought. Randy came back.

  The cloak jerked away as if it had been attacked and wrapped itself tightly around the vampire.

  Randy’s forearm was in front of Lacey. She looked down at its classic pose: man slaying dragon for fair maiden. Oh, Randy! she thought. You are so far away from being a dragon-slayer. But you slew him anyway.

  The room filled with humans instead of sick evil cloaks. “We came back!” shouted Roxanne.

  “We’re not cowards after all!” cried Sherree.

  The girls pushed Randy away and hugged Lacey themselves, laughing and proud. “We were decent in the end,” said Roxanne.

  Lacey did not tell them how terrible it had been for her, how their desertion had hurt her more than any vampire’s fang ever could. Lacey did not tell them how it felt to be utterly alone. Alone forever. She looked at Roxanne and Sherree and she let them be proud. She said softly, “Yes. You were decent in the end.”

  She wondered if that was enough. Did it erase doing something very bad, if you rushed back and undid it as quickly as you could? Or were you stained by that bad thing? Was it part of you now, like a scar on your heart?

  The vampire, flushed like a bird from a thicket, fluttered around the room. He did not leave, although he became more shadow than substance.

  Randy, standing taller, feeling broader, feeling better than ever before in his life, shouted, “What are you — a coward? You can’t take me on after all? I volunteer. Understand that, vampire?”

  The vampire’s voice creaked like an old floor under their feet. It scratched their souls like chalk on a blackboard. “You won’t be a hero,” said the vampire. “You do realize that, don’t you, Randy?”

  “I’m not trying to be one,” said Randy, who of course was trying very hard. Who had already decided he was a hero. Who had already reworked his entire life plan, so that he would be a hero in everything now, always. What would he do next? He had saved Lacey, perhaps next he would save the world. It was simply a matter of choosing which enemy to whip. Would it be global politics or virus research or —

  “Ah, sixteen,” said the vampire, returning to his original subject. “A dangerous age. This is, I suppose, a moral equivalent of pushing the accelerator to the floor. You, little Randy, will run the farthest, you will scurry the fastest, to save your little friend.”

  His voice was condescending: the adult who understood reality in a roomful of children who did not. His smile reemerged. This time, all the teeth were pointed, and neatly aligned, as if something had redrawn them — as if a new and more calculating vampire was going to fill the room.

  Randy felt a puncture wound in his side: not from the vampire, but from some new horror yet to be explained.

  He stared as one, and only one, of the fangs lengthened.

  It seemed to pierce his strength, his determination, his resolve.

  The old selfish Randy — who had vanished only moments ago — began to grow back. No! thought Randy. No! Please — let me be a hero!

  “You see,” said the vampire comfortably, like an old armchair, “you will not be a hero because your friends will forget the events of the night as they pass out of the building. They will retain no memory of you, Randy. No memory of me, either. No memory at all.”

  It’s true, thought Roxanne. I had already forgotten that I am covered with vampire slime. I had already forgotten that I have to scour myself clean and bake in the sun to get rid of his leavings. I had already forgotten that I lay in his nest. I, Roxanne, was contaminated by his actual lair. And I forgot that in those few steps down the stairs. If we had gone just a few more steps, we would have forgotten Lacey. Out of sight, out of mind. We would not have felt guilty because we would not have remembered there was an “event” to worry about.

  “Otherwise, of course,” added the vampire, “your friends would get fire trucks and police and who knows what? Obviously that cannot be allowed. So they will not remember. And a person who is forgotten, my dear Randy, cannot be a hero. A hero, by definition, is one whom his friends adore.”

  “He is a hero,” said Lacey steadily. “They are all heroes. They came back. They did not run. And that is the definition of a hero.”

  The vampire’s eyes grew larger and clearer. He studied Lacey with as much interest as he had before. “There is another interesting reality,” he said. A second fang grew down to meet the first. How could he talk with his teeth shifting like that? And yet, the voice hardly seemed to come from the mouth at all. It came from the entire room.

  “Nobody’s interested in your dumb old realities,” said Randy. He flung his head back. He spread his legs. He jammed his hands into his pockets, as if he had guns in holsters and would beat the vampire to the draw. “I don’t even think you can really do this, anyway,” sneered Randy. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as an ‘event.’ You’re nothing but a slimeball. Maybe I’m not a hero. But you’re not a vampire, either. You’re just a thing without power.”

  The darkness in the room became entire.

  The vampire gave off no phosphorescence.

  The room was utterly silent.

  They could hear no breathing. They could see no cloak. They dared not move, because they could not see their feet, nor the gaping hole in the floor that Roxanne had created.

  Roxanne could not help it. She wrapped one arm around the back of her neck.

  Sherree, tightly clinging to somebody’s hand, suddenly wondered just whose hand it was she held. Was it a human hand?

  Randy called the vampire’s bluff. “I’m waiting,” he said.

  Chapter 10

  “AW, COME ON, Ginny, lighten up,” said Jordan.

  Ginny was at a crossroads with Jordan, literally and figuratively. They could turn onto the valley road and head for the Mall House, or they could go on to their friends’ house where they were e
xpected.

  It was, thought Ginny, so annoying that you could not just go out for the evening. Everything always had to involve some sort of choice. Some sort of principle.

  All Ginny wanted was friends and pizza. A little company, a few laughs.

  Instead, she had a boyfriend problem.

  If she said, “No, Jordan, we’re going to the party, forget this driving-around-and-hunting-for-my-brother nonsense,” was she simply asserting her rights in this relationship, or was she bossing Jordan around?

  If she said, “Okay, Jordan, whatever you want, Jordan,” was she being good company and lightening up, or was she being a doormat on whom Jordan would scrape his shoes forevermore?

  Ginny was aware that one of her biggest personality problems was a tendency to analyze too often.

  Of course, one of Jordan’s biggest personality problems was that he never analyzed anything at all.

  What we need here, thought Ginny, is a compromise.

  Ginny frowned, climbing into her brain cells, hunting for a satisfactory compromise.

  The problem was, Ginny didn’t like compromising. Ginny liked having her own way.

  “I can’t idle at this intersection for our whole lives, you know,” remarked Jordan.

  “Why not?” said Ginny. “There’s no traffic tonight.”

  Jordan nodded in a slow, thoughtful way. “I don’t understand that, either,” he said. “Saturday night at this hour? There should be all kinds of cars going by, especially right here, and right now.” Jordan fluttered his hands like a passing ghost. “Perhaps,” he said, in a deep ghoulish voice, “there are other forces at work tonight.”

  “Perhaps,” said Ginny, letting herself get drawn in, “my little brother has been absorbed by an evil being.”

  “No doubt,” said Jordan. He rolled down the window of his car. “In fact,” he whispered, “the very air is redolent of evil.”

  Ginny rolled down her window.

  A strange thick smell sifted into their car.

  It was not car exhaust.

  Ginny did not know what it was. She only knew she was beginning to prickle all over with fear. “Jordan?” she whispered.

  Jordan was staring out the window he had just opened.

  His eyes were open far too wide. His hands had fallen off the steering wheel. His breath was coming in strange little spurts.

  Ginny looked where he was looking.

  Down the valley road. Down where once the hemlocks had towered around the old house with the twisted tower. Down where someday a parking lot would lie flat and black against the ground.

  The tower was visible against the sooty sky.

  And from the tower came curving, slinking squares of blackness like immense pieces of paper, curving and reshaping themselves.

  The smell grew worse.

  Ginny felt her lungs tiring, her heart slowing.

  Jordan’s hands went back on the wheel. Jordan’s foot lifted from the brake. The automatic transmission moved the car forward, slowly at first, and then gathering momentum. Jordan was not quite steering and not quite touching the gas pedal. The car was going down the valley road, going all by itself toward the black shape that lowered gently, as if to meet them.

  Ginny thought: Nobody will come to look for us. Because we’re supposed to be the ones doing the looking.

  “As I say,” repeated the vampire, “there is another interesting reality.”

  Randy tried to glare at the vampire, but it was difficult. The vampire did not stay in one place, and the parts of him that materialized changed each time.

  “You see,” said the vampire, “being a hero is a human reality. It is not part of my world. And it is within my world that we operate tonight.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Lacey. Could it really be correct that the six teenagers would retain no memory of the night’s events? How terrible that would be! Randy’s wonderful courage — lost like a fog burning off in the morning sun. Her own shattering fear — vanished like pain from a paper cut. This new deep knowledge of one another; this new view into the depths and the shallowness of five others — evaporated.

  Would Lacey really not know Sherree, or Zach, or Roxanne, or Bobby when school opened on Monday? Would they really be strangers to her as they had been strangers before? And Randy…

  What would Randy be?

  There would be less of him, the vampire had said. Not dead, and yet gone. Still breathing, and yet lacking personality.

  And would she, Lacey, for whom he had sacrificed, even know about it? Would she ignore him in the halls? Not see him in the cafeteria? Not care about him on the bus? Would Randy be faceless? Even though he had endured this horrible fate by choice, for their sake?

  Lacey did weep, after all.

  At least Randy saw that. At least Randy had a moment of tears.

  And then she wondered — would Randy remember?

  Would Randy be a zombie, staggering dimly through the remaining years of his life, lacking even the comfort of his own courage? Or would terrible knowledge lie within him — useless, unspoken?

  “My world,” said the vampire, very softly and very low. “In my world, you will recall, you had to choose my victim from among you. Randy has volunteered instead. And this, of course, saves him. Randy can no longer be my victim.” The vampire smiled. In his voice as rich as dark chocolate, he murmured, “I neglected to explain to you that a person who volunteers to sacrifice himself for others…” and here, the vampire smiled a smile so full of teeth it seemed that there were several vampires living in his mouth “…is always safe. You may leave if you wish, Randy.”

  Randy stared at the vampire. What was going on? What had happened to his great bravery, his sacrifice, his splendor?

  With a swirl of his cloak, the vampire discarded Randy. “You are out of the running, Randy. Very clever of you. Very self-serving.”

  Randy felt the world being yanked out from under his feet. “I didn’t volunteer to be clever,” he protested. He wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be applauded and lauded like athletes after great victories: like Bobby, for example.

  “No,” said the vampire gently, knowing Randy’s mind, “those are the daydreams of humans. They are not the realities of vampires.”

  Lacey was glad that Randy was safe. She had seen the best in Randy, and she wanted Randy to continue on that road — to be good and worthy and generous of heart. She smiled, looked down for privacy in her thoughts, and smiled again. At least something good would come from this.

  “Randy is safe?” repeated Zach.

  “He is safe,” agreed the vampire.

  Zach, Sherree, Bobby, and Roxanne studied Randy in his new role as the safe one, the one who would go free, the one who would definitely get home tonight. They felt a strange rage at Randy, because he was no longer part of the group; he had been removed to another zone.

  “The field,” said the vampire, “is narrowed. There are now five remaining choices for me. Five,” he repeated greedily. “Five. Five. Five. Five.”

  Lacey’s shudder was deep in her gut, but she knew that the vampire was aware of it, and enjoying it, and hoping there would be more.

  Only Sherree moved logically to the next point. “Heck,” said Sherree, “then I volunteer, too.”

  “Thank you, my dear,” said the vampire. His eyes softened with dreamy pleasure and his largest teeth slid over his damp lips and hooked at the bottom of his chin. “You may all go now. Except Sherree, of course. Most thoughtful of you to resolve the situation, Sherree.” The tongue that licked his lips was pointed like a red ribbon. He moved far more swiftly to Sherree than he had toward Lacey.

  “Wait!” screamed Lacey, grabbing Sherree’s arm and yanking her back. “This isn’t fair! You keep changing the rules.”

  “I am not changing the rules at all,” said the vampire. His breath came in spurts, like whiffs of swamp gas. “You just don’t know them. I can’t help it that you are not acquainted with the workings of my world. I
have certainly taken the time to become acquainted with your world.”

  The vampire’s cloak encircled Sherree’s arm. It began to haul her in, as if she were clothes on an old-fashioned clothesline, being reeled onto the back porch. From beneath the folds of his horrible wrappings came his fingernails, like crushed foil, and then his hands, longer than human hands, bonier than human hands, stronger than human hands.

  Sherree screamed in horror. The vampire was ecstatic. Screams were his appetizers.

  “Wait!” said Lacey. She had one of Sherree’s arms and the cloak had the other. “Wait. I have to think.”

  “You may think outdoors,” said the vampire. “It’s time for the five of you to go.”

  “No!” shouted Lacey. “You said to start with that we had to choose your victim. Well, we didn’t! You broke the rules. This does not count.”

  “Sherree volunteered for selfish purposes. I accepted. It’s not frequent for a victim to request being taken, but it is not unknown in history,” said the vampire, “and I am content with it.”

  Sherree broke free both from the vampire’s cloak and from Lacey. She ran in circles around the diminishing tower. There were no exits. Once again, the vampire possessed the door. Ripping mindlessly at the remaining shutters blocking the tower windows, Sherree tried to find a way out of her fate. Her strength far surpassed even Bobby’s, fueled by adrenaline from her deathly fear.

  Gradually, her frenzy diminished.

  Gradually, her crazed attempts ceased.

  And yet the vampire did not approach her. His head was cocked as if he had ears hidden beneath his horrid oily hair, as if he were listening to something.

  They all listened.

  Somewhere in the house, somebody was laughing.

  The policewoman was bored.

  Night duty was often boring.

  She did not actually want anything to happen, and yet if she were to stay awake, something had to happen. She drank from the take-out paper cup of coffee. It was chilly now. Pretty awful stuff. But she had nothing else to do, so she sipped again.

  The policewoman was quite young. She had graduated from the local high school not so long ago herself.