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.
She knew instinctively that the vampire wouldn’t want a boy. That left Roxanne, who was a tough sarcastic type, and Lacey, who was a ditz. They were pretty enough, in their own boring ways, but that was all. I mean really, thought Sherree, what other choices does this vampire have but me?
Sherree assumed that Zach or Bobby would save her.
She did not assume that Randy would. Randy was a little too meager in personality and body to save anybody.
Sherree studied Zach and knew that he was analyzing the situation. She had faith in his brain. He would find a good strategy. She watched Bobby. The athlete drew himself together. He had a fine body, more heavily muscled than most boys his age. No doubt he could rip a T-shirt’s sleeves by clenching his biceps. Bobby took a few steps backward, away from the door, gathering himself.
Sherree unwound from her terrified crouch. This was not completely different from cheerleading. You had to bounce off a gym floor from the most ridiculous positions and leap up. She would spring up and follow Bobby down the stairs.
Bobby turned himself into a battering ram.
Sherree lifted like a sprinter at the starting line.
Bobby flung himself across the tower and plunged through the door.
Except that he did not go through.
He remained in midair. Pinned to the atmosphere like a Velcro wall-jumper. Sherree stared. The door was open, and Bobby was hanging there. Not as if there were a noose around his neck, but as if he were an insect in the vampire’s collection, pinned at the joints on the bulletin board.
The vampire indeed possessed the door. And now, clearly, he also possessed Bobby.
Roxanne had the hammer.
Her parents were neatness fanatics: everything in its place. If you left your shampoo bottle on the tub rim, they freaked. If you left a CD out of its plastic holder, they freaked. If you allowed a used glass to rest on the counter instead of popping it instantly inside the dishwasher, they freaked.
So, of course, when the teenagers had gotten into the deserted mansion, and Randy yanked the plywood back to hide the opening he had made, and then absently set the hammer down on the same windowsill they had crawled over, Roxanne picked it up.
They might accidentally leave the hammer behind.
Or not be able to find it again in the dark.
Especially if their flashlight batteries ran down.
It was an ordinary enough hammer, slim handle, hard metal head and claws. She was not wearing a belt in her jeans, so she shoved the handle through a belt loop. It hung satisfyingly against her thigh, making her feel like a tough workman.
When Bobby flew against the vampire’s space, and stuck there, Roxanne found herself wondering if she would have to pry him off with the claws of the hammer.
“Bobby?” said Roxanne stupidly. “Are you okay?”
Bobby said nothing.
“Well,” said Zach, in his most maddening, above-it-all preppy voice, “I guess that lets out the door as an escape route.” Zach actually laughed. “You look a little strange up there, Bobby, my man.”
Bobby said nothing.
In spite of his teasing, Zach had not been amused. In fact, he had been unable to maintain his grip on the flashlight, which he dropped when Bobby smashed into the vampire’s space.
The pounding of his heart had increased. He felt like the bass drum in a marching band — he was nothing but a huge reverberating gong. His heart was thrashing around his chest just as Bobby had thrashed against thin air.
I’m afraid, thought Zach. He hated himself for it, hated the vampire for causing it, hated the others because they would surely see, and know.
Lacey retrieved the flashlight.
She examined Bobby’s predicament. Then she examined Bobby.
Bobby said nothing.
He was stuck there, and yet when she put her own hand into the air around him, she could not feel anything. She had expected to meet resistance. An invisible balloon skin. She groped around Bobby, but could feel no substance from which to peel him away. He was breathing, his lungs swelled beneath her touch, but still he said nothing.
“Eeeuuuhh!” shrieked Sherree. “How can you put your bare hand out there? What if the vampire touches you?”
Lacey shuddered. The vampire was there, of course. No doubt he was taking pleasure in this; it was, after all, the first entertainment he had had in a long time. But somehow she did not think that her hand was going to encounter his slime.
Her hand encountered nothing at all.
Lacey latched her hands around Bobby’s waist and pulled, but he did not come free. And he still said nothing. Nothing at all.
The weird thing was how normal it seemed, as if she had often met boys hanging in doorways and knew just what to do next. If you can’t pull, try pushing, she reasoned.
So she stepped through the very doorway the vampire supposedly possessed — the doorway Bobby’s body had not penetrated — and then turned around to push Bobby back into the tower room.
“You got through!” cried Roxanne, getting up. Roxanne hefted the hammer, ready to split the skull of any vampire that got close to her.
“Run, Lacey!” shouted Randy. He was so proud of her! She was not an airhead after all; he could brag about her now; now Bobby and Zach couldn’t say anything about Lacey.
But Lacey did not run.
For beyond the door, at the top of the tower stairs, was the vampire’s miasma of swamp gas. Wet slime coated her face and tried to get in her eyes. Horrible smells and even more horrible sounds filled her nose and ears.
The sounds were shrieks from another world: a dead world, a world of bodies the vampire had already used.
He had been here forever, thought Lacey. He was here before the house, and he will be here after the house. He is evil now, he was evil then, he will be evil after I am gone.
And now, Lacey knew why Bobby was not saying anything. He could not. He was deafened by the screams and the cries and the sobbing of the vampire’s past. He was looking right into it.
Bobby knew.
The rest of them were just guessing.
But Bobby knew what was going to happen to one of them.
Lacey screwed her eyes tightly shut, to keep from seeing the future and the past, and to keep the horrible swamp gas out of her eyes.
Nothing would have made Lacey run down the stairs into that oozing, sucking mud.
She pushed harder and harder on Bobby, but nothing happened.
Or at least, nothing happened to Bobby. Lacey herself stumbled back through the door, back into the tower.
Oh! The unbelievable relief of breathing real air again! No smog of corpses, no relics of pain.
On this side of Bobby’s pinned figure were four other normal human beings, with their normal bodies, circulating blood, expanding lungs, functioning brains.
“I know what it is,” said Lacey abruptly. She switched off the flashlight.
Sherree screamed. She had a powerful scream, and one that the mansion seemed to appreciate; the scream was welcomed into the terrible dark beyond the door.
Randy whimpered. Zach trembled convulsively. Roxanne’s eyes filled with tears.
Lacey said, “I think the dark is better. I think this tower was meant to be dark. I think the flashlight is an invader. We can’t use it again.”
She was right.
For now that dark had returned, Bobby sank.
Slowly. As if he were at the top of an old playground slide, rusty, no speed to it. A slide for tiny nervous children.
Bobby puddled to the floor of the tower, like Zach in his Halloween memory. Zach and Randy rolled their friend safely back to the center of the room.
In the middle of the tower the six of them huddled.
When Sherree reached out to hold hands, everybody responded.
Then Sherree said, “I can’t sit like this. My back is showing. Let’s turn around and have all our backs touching, and we’ll face out.”
“That’s worse,” said Bobby. His voice had changed. It was dull and leaden. It was not Bobby at all; it was somebody who had known suffering and pain, someone acquainted with fear, someone with no hope.
“Why is it worse?” whispered Sherree. Sherree tried to make herself smaller and smaller, but it was no good; she had spent a lifetime trying to show herself off, and she did not know how to go into reverse.
“I’ve seen what’s out there,” said Bobby.
Lacey had not seen.
Only heard.
That was enough.
Bobby’s voice was like cement. “Don’t go out the door,” he said. “Nobody go out the door.”
Roxanne felt as if the cement were around her feet and some gangster were going to throw her into the reservoir and drown her.
Bobby read her thoughts. “No,” he said, his voice as drowned as the vampire’s previous victims. “It’s worse than that, Roxanne. Don’t go out the door.”
Sherree grabbed her boyfriend’s shoulders. “Then how will we get out of here?” she screamed.
She could just see his eyes in spite of the dark but she wished that she couldn’t.
“We won’t,” said Bobby.