“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 expected.
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.
One-handed, she drove through the dark and quiet town. There used to be a lot more action on this side of the city, but since so many acres had been cleared for the future shopping mall, there was not much here. She paused at an intersection and considered driving past the old boarded-up mansion.
When the policewoman had been in high school, she had been a cheerleader, and had briefly known the girl who lived in that mansion. There had been parties there. Parties at which everybody seemed to know more than they let on. Parties from which people seemed to come and go as if they could move through walls. And then the girl herself had gone, as quickly and quietly as if she, too, had been walled up.
When the house was abandoned, nobody had ever gone there.
It was odd.
You would think — certainly the police force expected — that the teenagers of the town would see this as an ideal hangout.
But nobody had tried spending the night in its abandoned rooms. Nobody had spun doughnuts in its pathetic old gardens, and nobody had spray-painted initials in red paint on its sagging roof.
The policewoman had had a tumultuous high school career herself. There was not much she had not done, or tried, or at least watched. It was one reason she went into law enforcement: She was pretty familiar with the mood or the need that made a person break the law. She was stern now, but she understood.
There was no traffic. Really, it was remarkable. And on a weekend! Where were all the partying teenagers? The drunks who should be plastered by this time? The moviegoers who should be headed home after the late show?
The police car edged forward, as only police cars can, taking its eternal time, because nobody can argue.
But there were no other cars in sight that would mind the delay.
Setting the awful coffee in the cup holder, she approached the intersection of the valley road and the main downtown avenue.
The bright red taillights of a single car crept down the valley road and vanished.
The policewoman wondered whose driveway could possibly be down there. For a moment she waited to see if the taillights would reappear, as a very lost driver backed out of a very unpromising drive.
But none appeared.
Truly, the night was dead.
In lieu of any other action, the policewoman decided to go to the drive-in window of Dunkin’ Donuts. A jelly doughnut, she pondered, or a glazed cruller?
The police car turned the opposite direction from the twisted tower. The policewoman was not looking in her rearview mirror to see what was happening there.
But it would not have mattered if she had looked.
For vampires do not have reflections.
Sherree was swinging on one of the shutters, as if to hurl herself through the window, through the night, and come to a safe landing miles away.
The laugh shivered through the cracks in the plaster and came up through the cracks in the floorboards. It lay in the attic and it slid off the roof and it collapsed in the basement.
The laugh wrapped them like a gift box.
Except that the laugh was evil.
“Do vampires laugh?” said Zach. Zach did not sound as if he would ever laugh again.
“Vampires laugh,” said the vampire, “when they have a victim in sight. Other than that, it is quite rare.”
The shutters clattered.
All their little wooden slats clapped.
Sherree slid down from the shutter to which she had clung and fell in a heap on the floor. A second vampire entered the tower.