came to him as if called to a master, and as the winged creature landed like a bird, a voice, deep and accented, entered Rick’s brain as if pushed into his skull not through his ears, but via his frontal lobe.
I don’t like things killed on my property, and he is more welcome than you are.
Something dropped from that finger. Something red and frightening. Blood.
The figure disappeared in the same manner it arrived, with the abrupt speed of a quick-stepping, panicked heart. And with the light from the hall no longer invaded by the figure, the path of happy-place yellow illumination pulled out from the darkness the guest room’s patterned rug, and their messy, open suitcases, and the antique dresser Amy had admired so much when they’d first arrived.
So normal, so regular.
Except the door closed on its own.
As if it had been willed back into place.
“Rick?” Amy said in a small voice. “What was that? Am I dreaming?”
Overhead, footsteps, heavy and slow, crossed the floorboards of the attic. Which should have been empty.
Another memory from childhood now, and not of the city park and its Little League diamond and the striped mini–Yankees uniforms he’d worn with pride. This one was of his grandmother’s farmhouse, with the creaking stairs, and the second-story hall that made the hair on the nape of his neck stand to attention … because it led to the back bedroom where the girl had died from consumption.
Wheezing. Labored breath. Whispered weeping.
He had woken up to those sounds every night at 2:39. And each time, although he had been roused by the ghostly gasping, although the struggle for air was in his ears and his mind, he was aware upon his sit-up-fast of only silence, a dense, black-hole silence that consumed the echoes of the past and threatened, with its gravitational pull, to swallow him as well, no trace of his younger self left behind, just an empty twin bed with a warm spot where his living body had once lain.
Rick had always known, with the razor-sharp surety of a child’s self-preservation, that the silence, the horrible quiet, was the moment of death for the ghost of the little girl, the culmination of an endless, tortured cycle she re-experienced every night at precisely the moment she’d passed, her will losing the battle as her body’s functions failed, her long slide into the grave over, her end arriving not even with a whimper, but with a dreadful absence of sound, absence of life.
Scary stuff for the nine-year-old he had been.
He had never expected to feel anything close to that confusion and terror as an adult. But life had a way of special delivering packages that ticked to your emotional address, and there was no refusing the service, no way to not sign and accept them.
The past was permanent in the same way the future was always just a hypothetical, two ends of a spectrum where one was concrete and the other air, and the instantaneous now, the single real moment, was the fixed point from which the weight of life hung and swung.
“Is this a dream?” Amy said again.
When he found his voice, Rick whispered, “I’d rather not know for sure.”
Upstairs in the attic of the old mansion, Murhder re-formed and walked over to one of the dormers. As a vampire, he supposed his rescue of the bat, who was lapping up the welling blood on his forefinger and incapable of comprehending the breadth of salvation just rendered upon him, could be termed a professional courtesy.
Assuming you went by human mythology.
In reality, there was not much in common to be had. Vampires needed the blood of a member of their opposite sex to be at optimal strength and health—a nourishment he had not had for many years, and a requirement that he had been forced to forage for from lesser sources. Most bats, on the other hand, lived off of insects, although clearly, there was an exception to be made for what he had offered this present mammal. The two species were as separate as dogs and cats, although Homo sapiens had linked them through all manner of books, movies, TV, and the like.
Opening one-half of the arch-topped window, he extended his arm and shook the bat free, the creature winging out into the night, crossing over the shining face of the risen moon.
When he had purchased the Eliahu Rathboone B&B from its original owner, some century and a half prior, he had intended to live in it alone