Kitabı oku: «Twilight Hunger», sayfa 2

But her goal was none of them. Her goal was beyond, up the back stairway into the attic, where spiderwebs held court and dust ruled the day. She knelt as she had before and fished the book of matches from her jeans pocket, then lit the candles in the gaudy candelabra she’d found downstairs. As their soft yellow glow spread, she lovingly opened the hand-tooled chest, took out that first volume, stroked its cover and opened it slowly, careful not to break the brittle pages. Turning to the place where she had left off, she began to read. And once again she lost herself in the words.

2

It was fully thirteen years before I saw Sarafina again. Thirteen full years, during which I had learned many things. I had learned that no matter where we went, we would be driven out eventually. I had learned that no matter how honest we might be, we would be called thieves by strangers who knew nothing about us. So I learned to take what I wanted and wish them all damned. I might as well enjoy the fruits of the crimes attributed to me, I reasoned. If I were caught, I would pay for those crimes, whether I had committed them or not. Better I hang for my own offenses than for those of some pale-skinned whelp who pretended honesty and was believed without question, so long as there was a Gypsy nearby to take the blame.

But of all the things I had learned, one bit of knowledge eluded me, though I had sought it without end. I had never learned the mystery of Sarafina. Who she really was, how she was related to us, why she had been ousted from our band. Nor what was the nature of the curse she was said to carry.

Not until the night when my life nearly ended—did end, for all practical purposes. It did end—and a new one began. It was late autumn, and the year was 1848.

I was a young man then. Hotheaded and reckless. My family was about to pack up and move on yet again. Not because we had grown tired of the place but because the locals accused us of stealing livestock, and we knew the law would be on us soon.

Before we left, I had decided I would extract a pound of flesh from our accusers. More than a pound, actually.

The moon was newly born that night; only a strand of silver gleamed in the sky as I crept into the farmer’s barnyard. And even that light was blotted out more and more often as long, clawlike fingers of blue-black clouds reached across its slender arch. I didn’t care what I stole that night, so long as I took something. It was retribution. It was repayment for the slander done to me and mine.

The first animal I came upon was a bearded billy goat. I remember it well … fawn and white, and shaggy. Horns curving back, away from its head. Hooves in sad need of trimming, like the too-long fingernails of an old man.

Slipping a rope around its neck, I led the goat away from the shed where it had been penned. Across the worn ground where, by day, the hens would peck and dig. Now they were roosting along the top rail of the fence and in the scraggly young saplings here and there. The goat came along easily, right up until I passed through the gate and started away from the barnyard. Then it stopped all of a sudden, planting its forefeet and bleating loud and long and plaintively. It was like a scream in the night.

I should have let the animal go. But pride in a young man is sometimes overblown, and in me it was combined with anger and fury and frustration.

So I kept tugging on the lead rope, dragging the animal through the lush green grasses, which were damp with night dew. It dragged its feet, tugging and thrashing its shaggy head from side to side, bawling like a lost calf.

The farmer never called out, never ordered me to stop or release the goat or anything else. I never even knew he’d stepped out of his house. That was how silently death came for me that night. One moment I was cussing at an ornery goat, turning and tugging, the rope over my shoulder and the goat behind me. And the next I was facedown on the ground, my ears ringing from the explosion of the gunshot that had come as if from nowhere.

I could not believe it had happened so easily, so suddenly. Without fanfare or drama. The farmer had simply pulled the trigger of his black powder rifle, sending an earsplitting roar through the night and a lead ball through my back.

Shock and pain screamed in me in the seconds after I hit the ground. I felt, for a moment, the fire of the ball’s path and the rush of the warm blood soaking my clothes. But then something far more frightening than pain came to me.

Numbness.

It began at my feet, as best I can recall. And I wasn’t aware of it as it happened but afterward, when I heard the farmer’s footfalls coming closer. I realized that I could not move, that I could not feel my feet. Within a second of that realization I felt the numbness spreading, creeping up my legs as steadily as a rising tide. My hips and pelvis, my belly. It rose further, and the pain that was like a fire in my back vanished. It simply vanished.

I felt nothing. I tried to move my arms, my legs, but I could not.

I gasped in shock when my body suddenly flipped, for I had not even felt the toe of the cruel farmer’s boot as he used it to roll me onto my back. But I saw the hate in his eyes as he stared down at me, his weathered face like the bark of an aging cherry tree, white whiskers long and unkempt.

“Thievin’ Gypsy scum,” he said. He spat on me, and then turned and walked away, taking his goat with him.

He hadn’t killed me.

The relief of that was soon overruled by the realization that he would have, had he not been certain I would die on my own within a few minutes. I could not feel the blood spreading beneath me, staining the grass. But I sensed it flowing from my body, felt myself weakening steadily from the loss of it. Felt myself … dying.

I heard his footsteps retreating. Heard the door of his ramshackle house banging closed. And then I heard nothing beyond the gentle wind of the night, whispering in the trees. Whispering my name.

“Oh, sweet Dante,” a voice said from very nearby. Not the wind. Not this time. “You’ve brought this upon yourself far more quickly than I would have liked.”

I moved my eyes, turned my head very slightly, but only that. For the most part, my eyes seemed to be the only part of me I was still able to command.

Sarafina stood beside me, silhouetted by the night, like some dark angel. Those black fingers of cloud stretched over the stars behind her. I tried to speak, but the words came so softly, I knew she could not hear them. Then she knelt and bent close to me, and with every ounce of strength in me, I managed to say, “Sarafina … I am dying.”

Her soft hand brushed my dark hair away from my forehead. “No, Dante. You know full well I shall not let that hap pen.”

“B-but …”

“Hush. It is almost time.” She glanced down at my body, and I wondered what she saw. “You’ve nearly bled to death. It will only be another moment.”

My eyes widened, and panic choked me. “Sarafina!” I rasped, fear giving my voice new strength, though it still emerged as little more than a harsh whisper. “Please!”

“Trust me, my darling. You will not die.”

“But …”

“You will not die,” she said again.

I lay there, fading, fading, darkness closing in around the edges of my vision. I realized dully that she looked no different to me than she had when I’d seen her last. No older. No different at all.

“There now. That’s better.”

My eyes opened, fell closed, opened again. My breaths came shallow and sparse, and I could feel my heartbeat. It pounded in my ears, ever slower … slower … slower….

“Listen to me, my special one,” she said, and her voice seemed to come from very far away, as if she spoke to me from the depths of a cave. “You have a choice to make, and it must be made now. There will be no time to deliberate. Do you wish to die? Here and now? Or live, though it will mean living in exile, as I do? Hated by the family, outcast and driven away.”

I felt weak. As if I were becoming a shadow. I didn’t understand her questions.

“Life or death, Dante? Speak your answer. If you delay, the choice will be gone. You will die. Tell me now. Which will it be? Life … or death?”

I strained to form the single word but never heard it emerge from my lips or felt them move at all. It was all I could do to think the word with the intention of speaking it aloud. Life.

“Good.”

She moved. My vision was fading, so that I could not see where she went, what she did. Then she pressed something warm and wet to my lips and whispered, “Drink, Dante. This is the elixir that will make you live. Drink.”

The warm, thick liquid touched my lips, and there was a quickening of my senses, followed at once by a shocking sensation of need. I closed my mouth around the font she offered and nursed at it like a suckling babe. Life seemed to awaken in me, along with a hunger such as I had never known. My arms moved, my hands clasping this bounty, holding it to my face, as I sucked at the luscious fluid that flowed into me.

“Enough!”

Sarafina gripped a handful of my hair and jerked my head away. And only then did I realize it had been her wrist at which I’d been so eagerly feeding. Her blood I had been drinking so hungrily. Even now, she pulled her forearm away, tugging a scarf from her hair and wrapping it tightly around the wound.

Horrified, I felt my stomach lurch, turning my head away from her and lifting my hand to swipe at my mouth.

“It’s all right, Dante,” she whispered. “It is the way the gift is shared.”

I looked down at my hands, red with the blood I’d wiped from my mouth. But alive. Strong. I moved my fingers, made fists.

“What is this?” I asked her softly. “What … what does this mean?” And even as I said it, the numbness was receding down my body. The feeling rushed back into my torso, my legs and my feet, with heightened intensity.

My senses prickled with keen new awareness. My skin tingled at the touch of the very air. My eyes seemed to see more vividly, more precisely, than ever they had. And strength surged through my veins.

She tore my shirt away, making strips of its fabric as she spoke. “It is a gift, young Dante, though the old one calls it a curse. It is a gift I have given to you. You will never die now. Never grow older. And though your family will turn against you, you will never be alone, as I have been. For I will be with you. Always.”

Looking over my shoulder at her, for she was now wadding the fabric and stuffing it into the wound in my back, which caused me immense pain, I shook my head. I did not understand. She tied several strips tightly around me, to hold the wads in place, then reached down, clasped my hand and helped me to my feet, and even as I rose, I saw the old man’s silhouette looming just behind her.

I opened my mouth to shout a warning.

Before I said a word, Sarafina turned with such speed she seemed a mere blur. The farmer’s rifle went sailing through the air, out of sight, firing harmlessly into the woods as it hit the ground. And Sarafina, the beautiful, gracious woman by whom I had been so entranced, gripped the farmer’s shirtfront and jerked him forward. Before I could even react, she had fastened her mouth to his throat.

I heard the sounds…. I saw, very clearly in the darkness now, what she was doing. Drinking … his blood. Gorging herself at his throat. At first the farmer pounded her back and kicked at her … and then … then he simply surrendered. I heard his sigh, saw him close his eyes and even wrap his arms around her. He let his head fall backward, and I saw him grind his hips against Sarafina’s as she continued to suck at his throat.

And then there was no life left in him at all.

She let go his shirt, and the corpse fell to the ground. Empty. A rag-poppet. Utterly drained.

With one of her scarfs, Sarafina dabbed delicately at her mouth as she turned to face me. I gaped at her, my mouth working soundlessly.

“Don’t look so shocked, Dante. Are you telling me you’re only just figuring it out? Hmm? We are Nosferatu. We are undead.” She licked her lips, tilted her head and smiled very slightly at me. “Vampires,” she whispered, and I swore the night wind picked up the word and repeated it a thousand times in a thousand voices.

Vampires.

A breeze from some unseen source made the candle flames leap and flicker. Morgan tore her eyes from the weathered pages and automatically looked behind her. But of course no one was there. Nothing was there. This wasn’t real.

It wasn’t real.

“Oh my God,” Morgan whispered. “This isn’t a diary. These aren’t memoirs. It’s … it’s fiction. It’s incredible, breathtaking fiction!”

Oh, maybe not to the man who had written it. The delightfully insane artist who had crafted this tale had, perhaps, even believed it. Imagine. A man who honestly thought he was a vampire. A man who had, in all likelihood, lived here. Right here. In this house.

Something scraped the window, and Morgan whirled, her hand flying to her chest as her heart leapt. But it was only a tree limb, bent and clawlike, scratching at the glass. Not some creature of the night who called himself Dante, come back to claim his diaries and his house. Of course not. Vampires were not real.

The sudden movement, the scare, left her slightly dizzy and made her chest pound. She waited for it to ease. The rush of breathlessness passed, as it always did. She drew a few deep, cleansing breaths and glanced at her watch. She had been sitting in the dark, musty attic for hours, lost in the imaginary world of a madman. When she should have been working on her own tales of intrigue.

God, how was she ever going to have a saleable script ready for David in three months? Especially now, when all she wanted to do was read more of this incredible tale.

Vaguely she wondered how long it had taken the imaginative Dante to pen his fantasies. Not long, she thought … if every journal in this stack were filled. And even then, she didn’t know how he had managed it all in one short lifetime.

He was dead, though. He had to be dead, because she had finally come upon a date, so there was no doubt. And his words, his tales … they just lay there, untouched. So vivid, so wonderfully written, it was almost heartbreaking that they hadn’t been shared with the world. God, if she had written something this good and it had never been seen, she would have been.

Oh.

Oh. The thought that just occurred to her! This could be her work. For all anyone else knew, it could all be her work. Who the hell would ever know the difference?

“No,” she whispered aloud. “It wouldn’t be right.”

Wouldn’t it? her mind argued. She had just decided it was criminal that this work hadn’t been shared. She had just acknowledged that if she had been the author, she would have spent eternity regretting that the work lay here, undiscovered. The written word was meant to be read, after all. Not hidden away but … shared. Experienced.

She knelt again in front of the trunk, licked her dry lips. What harm would there be, she wondered? Dante was long dead, and no one else could possibly know of the existence of these diaries. Could they? Of course not! If they did, these journals wouldn’t have been left here to molder in a dusty attic.

And there were so many of them!

“My God,” she whispered. “This is a gold mine. I’m sitting on an absolute gold mine here.” And as she sat there, staring down at the trunk full of stories, she knew that they were even more than that. They were the key to getting everything she wanted, to reclaiming everything she had lost. Wealth. Power. Fame. Her triumphant return to L.A. It was all right here. Almost like a gift … left just for her by some long-dead madman who’d called himself Dante and believed himself to be a vampire.

She took the first journal carefully, holding it to her breast like a lover as she straightened, and, turning, she carried it downstairs to her office.

This time, when she held her hands over the keyboard, Dante’s journal was lying open on the table beside the computer. And this time, the words came.

3

Maxine Stuart was watching JFK for about the twelfth time on the little VCR/TV combo in her bedroom, a copy of Catcher in the Rye in her lap, a half-dead can of Coke on the bedside stand, when she heard the sirens. The sound stabbed her in the belly like an ice-cold blade and brought her slowly to her feet, though she couldn’t have said why. She went to the window, pushed the curtains aside. She could see the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles passing on the highway in the distance. Heading south. Her gaze turned in that direction, and she narrowed her eyes on the faint red glow in the distant night sky.

A familiar Jeep bounded into her driveway, and about a second later she heard the front door of the small house open, heard her mother speaking to Max’s friends as she let them in. Maxine shut the TV off, turned and opened her bedroom door as they came hurrying through the house.

Her two best friends came around a corner into the hall and stopped when they saw her standing there. Something was up. Jason didn’t shake easily, and he looked shaken. Storm—her real name was Tempest, but she hated it—was downright pale. Maxine’s mom was right on their heels.

“So what is it, what’s burning?” Max asked.

“It’s Spook Central,” Jason said without even missing a beat. “It’s bad.”

“It’s awful,” Stormy added, and her round jewel-blue eyes were damp. “I don’t think anyone got out alive.”

Spook Central was Maxine’s pet name for the large, nameless government compound just outside town. The main building was huge and sat well back from the road behind a large, electrified fence, surrounded by surveillance cameras and shrouded in secrecy. A research lab—that was the party line, anyway, and so the gullible locals believed. Medical research was done there—they were working on finding cures for cancer and AIDS, stuff like that. Good work. Almost holy. Too sacred to mess with or poke around in. Who would question such a saintly mission?

Maxine had her own theories, as she did about most things, and right now she hoped to God the one she had always considered the most likely—that the place was a military lab working on germ warfare and chemical weapons—was dead wrong.

Nightmare images from Stephen King’s The Stand coiled and uncoiled in her mind until she shook them away and stepped into action. She turned, reaching back into her room to snatch a jacket from the back of a chair. Then she was striding down the hall. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Go where?” her mother asked, falling into step behind the three of them as they headed for the front door. When no one replied, Ellen got around them, stepping right into their path. “Max, don’t you go over there. You’ll just get in the way and maybe get hurt.”

“Come on, Mom, I’m twenty years old. I’m not going to bother the firefighters. I just want to know what’s going on.”

“Then read about it in the morning paper, like everyone else.”

“God, how can you be so innocent?”

Ellen Stuart sighed, looking worried, but also resigned. No one had ever really been able to change Maxine’s mind once it was made up about something, and her mother ought to be getting used to that by now, having experienced it firsthand from the day she brought the three-month-old orphan home for the first time. “Be careful.”

“Always.” Maxine yanked a mini-backpack off the hook by the door. An iron-on patch with the words Trust No One and the X-Files logo decorated its front. She slung it over her shoulder, and the three friends trooped out of the house.

They all piled into Jason’s creamed-coffee colored Jeep Cherokee. He liked to joke that he had picked the color to match his skin. And it did, pretty closely. Maxine took the back seat. Stormy, a pixie-sized psych major with short, spiky, bleached hair, got into the front with Jason, closing her door just as he backed out into the street and headed out of town.

Maxine sat on the edge of her seat, her head between the two in the front. “You can see the fire from here. Look at that.”

They did. Stormy shivered, lowered her eyes. Jason stared as if mesmerized for a moment, then snapped out of it, flicking on the radio, turning the dial. “I knew you’d want to go,” he said. “It came over my brother’s scanner. If he wasn’t a volunteer firefighter, I probably still wouldn’t know.”

“Still nothing about it on the radio, Jay?” Stormy asked. She was nervous; playing with her eyebrow ring was always a sign of that.

He kept flicking the dial, then gave up, shaking his head slowly. “I expected special reports, crap like that, but there hasn’t been a word.”

“They report what they’re told to report,” Maxine said. “Despite my mother’s gullible belief in the system, the phrase ‘free press’ is an oxymoron in this country.”

“I like your mom,” Jason put in.

Max blinked at him as if he were speaking another language. “I like her, too. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“I just don’t think you ought to be calling her gullible. She wouldn’t like it.”

Maxine closed her eyes, shook her head, then glanced at Stormy for backup.

“He’s right,” Stormy said. “Your mom is cool. You’re so lucky.”

“Of course she’s cool! Hell, I would have gotten a dorm room or an apartment or gone to college out of town if she wasn’t cool, instead of staying home and going to a local school. But this has nothing to do with my mother or how cool she may or may not be! I’m talking about the government here. Cover-ups. Covert operations.”

Stormy shrugged, averting her eyes. Topics like this always made her uncomfortable. But Maxine wasn’t uncomfortable discussing it. She was more uncomfortable having lived practically in the shadow of that huge, fenced in, well-guarded compound all her life, and never once knowing what went on inside.

She knew only one thing for sure. It wasn’t cancer research. She would have given her eyeteeth for a look beyond the tall, electrified fences of that place. Just one look. Now maybe no one would ever know the truth.

Jason drove on, pulling the Jeep over onto the right-hand shoulder before they got to the point where emergency vehicles lined both sides of the road. Highway flares lay across the pavement. Orange and white striped sawhorses with red reflectors were lined up behind them, forming a boundary that was supposed to tell them to keep out. They got out of the Jeep. Flames in the distance licked at the night sky, and Max could already taste the smoke in her mouth with every breath.

“This way.” Maxine walked along the road’s right shoulder, beyond the parked vehicles, and her friends followed. The burning compound was on the left, at the end of a long curving drive. She led the others forward until they were directly across the street from the entrance to the compound. Firefighters were across the street, partway along the drive, facing away from them. They were completely focused on their work, anyway. Maxine crouched near an ambulance, tugging the others down with her.

The fire trucks had apparently driven straight through the gate at the head of the drive. The guardhouse nearby was empty, the gate itself lying flat. The fence to the left and right of it was buckled and broken. The surveillance cameras that had been mounted on poles lay smashed to bits. Volunteer firefighters in yellow jackets marked with glowing silver reflective tape manned huge hoses attached to tanker trucks in the curving paved drive. Every time they beat the flames down a little, the trucks would roll closer, the men pushing farther into the fury.

“I don’t know how they can stand it. God, I can feel the heat from here,” Stormy said, pressing a palm to her face.

“I’m surprised their hoses aren’t melting,” Jason whispered. “If they move any closer …”

“If they move any closer, we’ll be able to get in.”

The other two looked at Maxine as if she had sprouted horns.

“What?” she asked.

“You gotta be out of your freaking mind, Max,” Jason told her, while Storm just shook her head. “We can’t go in there.”

“No one’s watching the entrance. They’re all distracted, fighting the fire. We can get in without even trying.”

“Okay, I’ll rephrase that. We can go in there. But we shouldn’t.”

Now it was Maxine’s turn to gape. “What are you, crazy? I’ve been dying to get behind those gates since I was old enough to see through that lame cancer research cover story they’ve been using.”

“Which was when she was about six,” Stormy muttered.

Max shot her a look but hurried on. “Don’t you guys get it? This is our chance. No guards, nothing. We can finally see something besides the lie.”

“And just what do you think there’s gonna be left to see, Max?” Jason pointed at the place. “It’s completely engulfed in flames.”

“I won’t know until I try.”

He sighed, lowering his shaved head and running a hand over it. No one spoke again for a long time as they crouched and waited and watched. Twenty minutes went by before the firefighters pushed a few yards closer. Max shot to her feet, glanced both ways and ran across the street. Her two friends hesitated, then followed. They crossed the pavement and jogged through the opening, right over the mesh of the toppled gate, past the abandoned guardhouse and into the trees that lined the driveway. There were a lot of them. The better to block the place from the view of casual passersby, Max thought. Pines. Of course they were pines. Year-round-camouflage for whatever went on inside.

They ducked beneath one of the trees, and Max stared ahead. The fire was being steadily beaten down. Those firefighters were something else, she thought, wondering if Jay’s older brother, Mike, was among them. They never gave up, even though they had to realize by now that it was a lost cause.

More sirens came, and Max looked back toward the road to see police cars, cops getting out, dispersing some of the curious onlookers who had now begun to gather on the road out front. “We just made it in time,” she whispered.

“If they catch us in here, our asses will be toast,” Jason said.

“If we get any closer to that inferno, they might be toast anyway,” Stormy added.

The firemen ahead fought on, soaking the place down, beating back the flames and pressing ever closer. The trucks rolled forward a little more, and Max urged her unwilling comrades to do the same. “See that flagpole over there?” she asked, pointing. Jason and Storm looked at it, then at her.

“Once they get up that far, we can cut around the side of the building and make our way to the back.”

“And then a flaming wall can come down on us, crushing us and roasting us at the same time,” Storm said. Her gaze was fixed on the burning building, and the flames’ reflection danced in her eyes.

Max swallowed any second thoughts she had about dragging her two best friends into this, beat them down the way the firefighters beat down the flames. It was for the greater good, she told herself. And besides, they wouldn’t get hurt. She wouldn’t let them get hurt. Maxine Stuart took care of her friends.

Movement drew her attention. “There they go!”

As the fire truck rolled ahead, Max ran forward, cutting off to the left and moving rapidly away from the pool of firelight that spread like an aura from ground-zero. The trees ended there, and she paused at the very last one. She tried not to feel a huge sense of relief when she realized Jason and Storm were still at her side. But she felt it anyway. God, they were loyal.

The distance from the front to the back of the rubble that had once been the main building was at least half a football field, without so much as a shrub for cover. But it was dark. Getting darker with every cloud of thick smoke that wafted from the fire.

“We can make it,” Max said.

“They’re gonna haul our asses to jail for this, Maxie,” Jason said.

“Ready?”

Neither of them answered her. Max licked her lips and trusted them. “Go!” And she ran.

She was never certain they were following until she stopped when she reached what had been the far end of the building and they bumped into her in the darkness. Hands gripped shoulders as they steadied each other. Then they stood for a moment, catching their breath, squinting into the darkness. There were fifty feet between where they stood and the smoldering remains at the rear of the building. It no longer much resembled a building at all. It wasn’t tall or square. It was a heap. Flames leaped up here and there, although most of the real fire had moved hungrily toward the front, having had its fill here, it seemed. There were glowing red shapes forming mounds underneath the charred forms of the skeletal underpinning. There were ashes, smoke. Were there people in there? she wondered. Bodies?

“This is close enough,” Stormy whispered.

Max looked around. “You see that shrub over there? It’s out of the smoke.” She pointed. “You two wait for me there. I promise I won’t be long.”

“Don’t, Max,” Jason warned. He sounded pissed off. “Just … don’t.”

“Five minutes,” she said. “Just five freaking minutes. This is once in a lifetime, Jay.” She didn’t wait for him to argue. She ran, instead.

They didn’t follow this time.

It was hot. Damned hot, and the smoke was burning her eyes and her nose, and she kept trying not to cough too loudly and give herself away. She ran until she reached the rear of the building, and then she moved closer and closer to it, as close as she could stand to get. She figured her hair was probably getting a little singed, and she had to watch where she put her feet to keep from stepping on smoldering embers that would have melted right through the soles of her shoes.