HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (48 page)

Chancellor ended
the story and asked for a show of hands from any students who knew of
other myths of eternal life held by primitive people.

Dell, touched by
the story of the Namibians, lowered her head and thought it all out.
The myth was right. That's what her teacher did not know. Not only
was the moon eternal, but all that lived beneath it, even the hares.
And some of the eternal life walked among the living as if alive,
too, and no one was the wiser. She was now an eternal creature, but
even if she'd remained human and died human, she would have only been
invisible, and not gone forever.

When the bell rang,
indicating the end of class, Dell gathered her books and headed for
the door, the thoughts of the Namibian tale still puzzling her. She
felt someone tap her on the shoulder in the hall and she turned.

"Hi," he
said. "My name's Ryan. You're Della?"

"Just Dell,"
she said. "My mom named me after a singer she liked." A
lump rose in her throat to prevent her from speaking anymore. She'd
had a few boyfriends, nothing serious, but she could not remember
being this attracted or tongue-tied. Ridiculous, she told herself.
Stop being so damn ridiculous.

Despite her own
growing sense of foolishness, she sent out an intense thought that
she knew would be embedded in his mind. Dell's special. Dell's the
one for me. She couldn't help herself. She found him so attractive
she felt she had to make sure he thought of her in the same way.

She said, clearing
her throat first, "You're from North Dallas? How do you like it
here?"

He fell into an
easy walk at her side. "I like it just fine," he said.
"Particularly all the different kinds of kids here. It's like
being in another world." He gestured mildly toward some of the
kids dressed in black walking in front of them.

Dell glanced over
at him to see if he was for real. He liked the outcasts? He thought
them cool? Kids who were only making their lives harder and cutting
themselves off from whole groups of people?

"Really?"
she said. Then she laughed, thinking how odd she was. "Well, we
have a lot of different kinds of kids here, that's for sure."

"Does Mr.
Chancellor always talk about rabbits and the moon?"

"Oh, he goes
off on these tangents now and again. It's the only time I listen to
him."

"I can see
why." He grinned. "The rest of the time he's pretty dull.”

"You noticed,
huh?" She smiled at him.

They parted ways
when she turned into her next classroom and his own class was in
another wing of the school. "Nice to meet you, Dell," he
said, as he sprinted away in order to beat the bell.

She stood watching
him go and thought to herself, Yeah, nice to meet you, too. Now she
knew for sure he liked her. So what was she going to do about that,
beyond the thought she'd implanted? What could she do?

She could hardly
wait for her meeting with Mentor after school. She was to go to his
house every day where he would train and guide her until she was
ready to go on her own. The first thing she would ask was about a
vampire's personal life. Her responsibility to humans and her
interaction with them. She really needed guidance. She hoped there
was no strict rule against relationships with humans, especially
since she would be walking and living among them. She envisioned a
dreary thousand-year life without them.

~*~

The first thing
that struck Dell on entering Mentor's house was how dark it was. He
must have read her mind for he said, "I can turn on the lights
if you'd like." He hit a switch that caused an overhead light to
come on, though she noticed it was a small, sparkly chandelier
holding three small bulbs. It gave out a weak glow that hardly chased
the dark away. Shadows retreated, but not far, cringing in the
corners of the room.

"No, the light
doesn't bother me," he said as if she'd asked him a question. He
motioned for her to sit on a sofa near the fireplace. "I've
become accustomed to the dark. The sunlight won't bother you for long
either. You'll be able to dispose of those soon."

Dell removed her
sunglasses, folding the stems carefully and placing them in her lap.
"I went back to school today."

"How did it
go?" He sounded cheerful as he settled into an opposite sofa,
stuffing a pillow behind his back.

"Okay, I
guess. One of my best friends asked why I was wearing the sunglasses,
but no one else seemed to care. Lots of kids wear them in school."

"Do they?"

"Yeah, sure.
Kids into. . . well, alternative thinking, you might say. You know."

He smiled
indulgently. "Well, contrary to common belief, I don't really
know everything, Dell. I haven't been inside a high school in quite a
few years."

She shrugged.
"Okay, well, there's some kids who are outside the mainstream.
They keep to themselves, they wear different kinds of clothes to
distinguish them from others. They wear heavy eye makeup and
sunglasses all day. Some of them . . ." she paused, wondering
how he would take this, ". . . some of them want to be
vampires." She hurried on, seeing his eyebrows raise, "They're
just all disillusioned, kind of like the hippies in the Sixties, I
guess. The Establishment sucks, that sort of thing. The really sad
ones cut themselves on their arms. I don't know if it's for the pain,
like they like it . . ." She shrugged. ". . . and sometimes
they let others drink their blood, but it looks pretty dangerous to
me. Some of them get their teeth filed down. Stuff like that. I
always wanted to take them aside and tell them they shouldn't want to
act that way. They should love walking in the sunlight and take good
care of their bodies. They shouldn't want to live forever on nothing
but blood; it's not natural."

She didn't know
she'd thought all these things until she just now confessed them to
Mentor. It was as if he drew things out of her, her deepest and most
private thoughts. It could be a trick, but she suspected it was not.
She was simply comfortable with him and knew he had her best
interests at heart. She guessed that this was how people felt when
they went to shrinks and talked openly about their problems.

That he did not
know about the pretend-vampires at her school did not surprise her.
Though they had been in the news now and then, most people just tried
to pretend they didn't exist. She'd heard about a case where a
"vampire" boy in the Northeast lost touch with reality and
murdered his parents while they slept. He had self-inflicted cuts all
over his arms, and he said vampirism gave him "freedom."
She didn't think Mentor paid really close attention to what was going
on in society, especially among the youth.

Mentor shifted
uneasily on the sofa, stuffing the pillow at his back again. He said,
"I didn't know some of your contemporaries were heading in that
direction. Like you, I think that's a dangerous road to take. I
suppose, because of the way the vampire is romanticized in American
entertainment, it would be only natural for the disenchanted to rush
toward the unknown, to seek it out, and to make it their own. The
young have a way of finding something they think is new to believe
in."

"What was that
noise?" Dell asked abruptly, sitting forward on the sofa. It was
from down below, in his basement, a terrible moaning. All her nerve
ends began to tingle, and it was as if her brain came alert, red
lights blinking in all corners of her mind as it checked for danger.

"Would you
like to see for yourself?" He rose and took her hand. He led her
to the kitchen and the basement door.

"No one I know
in Texas has a basement," she said, fascinated.

"This was
constructed especially for me. I felt it would come in handy. In
rainy seasons it weeps a little, but otherwise it seems to do well."

She followed him
down the narrow stairs into the soft gloom. There was a small lamp on
an old wooden table along the wall facing the stairs, but it
illuminated little. The place was damp and cool and smelled like wet
metal. She sensed a being in the basement and knew he was their kind,
but she was curious as to what he was doing in Mentor's basement and
wondered at the despairing moan she'd heard.

Mentor stepped
aside at the bottom of the stairs and put his arm around her
shoulder. She looked over at the pitiful creature chained to the
concrete wall. He lifted his head and opened his eyes. "Do you
have to chain her, too?" he asked.

"No, she just
wanted to know what the noise was about. How are you today, Dolan?"

"I'm almost
ready to go home."

"I'm happy to
hear that."

Inquisitive, Dell
turned her head toward Mentor, wondering what this was all about.

Reading her mind,
Mentor said, "Dolan here almost did away with himself and the
whole house of Cravens where he was living. I have talked him out of
those desperate actions. Haven't I, Dolan?"

"Yes, Master."

Dell laughed,
hearing the sarcastic mockery in the other man's voice. He was
mimicking Dr. Frankenstein's toady. "So you've changed your mind
because you're chained here?"

He gave her a
silent stare before responding. "Mentor's given me some time to
think it over."

"This is sort
of a 'safe' place," Mentor explained. "If Dolan wished, he
could free himself from the chains, and he could get out of this
basement, too. By not exerting his will and by staying quietly alone
to contemplate the sin he had wished to commit, he has come to a new
understanding."

"Don't let him
fool you," Dolan said. "It would take tremendous willpower
to free myself, and he knows I'm too weak to do it. But he's still
right. I have allowed the imprisonment, and I work out my problems in
solitude."

Upstairs again, the
basement door bolted, they took their seats across from one another
on the twin sofas.

"What did his
moaning mean?" she asked.

"It probably
escaped him when he realized there were two of us free here,
upstairs."

"I felt sorry
for him."

Mentor nodded
knowingly. His eyes reflected his own pity. "Killing is only
allowed to the Predators, because it's in their nature and can't be
gotten out of them. But a Craven who decides to kill himself and
others who have not asked him to do so, is an aberration. He needed
help, that's all. But now let's talk about you."

Dell looked away.
So many questions were on her mind. Which one should she ask first?
"Will I ever feel natural again?"

"You will.
Yes, you will. It takes time."

"I met a boy
today . . ."

"Human?"

"Yes. I think
he may be interested in me. I was interested first, before . . .
before this happened." She meant her death in the natural world.
She waved her arm around herself as if she were an organic model that
had been hand built. "What I want to know is. . ."

She didn't finish
her sentence and was quiet for so long that he prompted her. "Yes?"

"Well, what I
want to know is can I have a boyfriend? I know it sounds stupid to
you. Juvenile." She looked down, embarrassed. "But I'm
seventeen, Mentor. I haven't changed so much that I don't care about
. . . people."

"Can you have
a human boyfriend, you mean?"

She glanced away
again, knowing the answer was going to be negative and wishing she'd
never asked it. She said in a soft voice, "Can I ever have
someone to love?"

Mentor scooted
forward on the sofa and rested his hands between his knees. In his
old body with his Albert Einstein gray, unruly hair, he was hardly
intimidating, but she drew herself to attention under his heavy
stare.

"No one can
stop you from getting involved with humans," he said. At her
look of surprise, he continued, "Naturals live side by side with
them. It happens often that the close proximity creates a bond. You
must know what the drawbacks are?"

"I know some
of them," she said. She thought about it a moment and realized
the greatest drawback. "Humans die."

He sat back. "Just
so. Humans die. If we really want to, we can give our diseased cells
to one of them, changing him into one of us, but that's so rarely
done that it's almost nonexistent. Giving someone this kind of life
is too monumental a decision to make without any concern or thought.
You understand that, don't you? We don't really have the right to
grant eternal life. When we do it, we also grant eternal agony."