“I ask only that you wait here in the car for a few minutes, Joe, if you would be so kind. I shall walk back to the building myself.”
Joe shook his head. “Maybe you can just walk around London alone at night, I wouldn’t know. Here it isn’t always safe—ah!”
The stubborn old man had started to get out. Joe, determined to use gentle force if necessary to make him behave sensibly, had taken him firmly by the coatsleeve. It wasn’t reasonable that the old man’s flesh could really have delivered a stinging electric shock to his hand through the thick cloth. But that was what it had felt like. Rubbing his thumb and fingers together now, testing for injury, Joe could feel nothing wrong. He must have somehow twinged a nerve or twanged a tendon.
By now the old man was standing at his ease outside the re-closed door. “I shall be quite safe,” he murmured with a smile, and touched his dark hatbrim. He turned away and in a moment long strides had taken him around a corner.
All right, the chances were, of course, that nothing would happen. Winter nights were safer than summer ones on the streets of the core city, and the streetlighting here was excellent. But to a stranger, a perhaps innocent foreigner, there was a special responsibility.
Joe got out of the car on his side, buttoned up his jacket, and walked to the corner, flexing the fingers of his right hand. They felt fine, now. He would catch up with the difficult old man and walk along. How did he get into these things? But at the same time he was relieved not to be home alone in his apartment.
He stood at the corner, squinting thoughtfully down a long, broad sidewalk almost empty of pedestrians. The old man was nowhere in sight.
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 stilclass="underline" “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?”