I Travel by Night (9 page)

“We’ve been waitin’ for
you
!” said the blonde female with a fierce grin, as Lawson and Ann reached the top of the stairs. At closer range, her eyes were sunken in and glinted with red in the candlelight and the front of her dress was dark with dried blood. Lawson could feel Ann shrinking back.

“Steady,” he told her, as much for himself as anyone. They were both a long way from home.

The music was becoming more frantic and ragged. Within the chamber that stood before them, candles burning on wall sconces illuminated the figures at this demonic festival, their shadows thrown large upon the moldy green walls. To the tune of vampire musicians playing two fiddles, a bass violin and a pair of tambourines, the gathering danced and whirled across the rot-stained boards, some moving so fast they were only ghostly blurs. By Lawson’s quick count, there were between thirty and forty creatures of the night at this fandango. There was nearly an equality of men and women of various ages in appearance, yet Lawson knew appearances could be deceiving in this regard. A few pallid children clung to the legs of what might be their mothers, indicating a sorry and sad history for that particular family. The women in their dirty gowns twirled and the men in their mud-stained suits pranced back and forth. Eyes that sparked red in the light of the flickering tapers were aimed quickly in the direction of Lawson and his charge, and just as quickly averted.

The young blonde vampire leaned forward to sniff Ann’s hair. Ann cringed away with a start and brought her six up into firing position. The girl laughed and snatched the dark green jockey’s cap from Ann’s head. Putting it on her own head, the less-than-human creature darted away to join the dancers, the speed of her departure blowing the tapers dead in her candleabra.

“I neglected to tell you,” said Lawson, “how fast they…
we…
are. Take a good long look. You may never see such a sight again.” If you live after seeing this one, he thought grimly.

The music urged the vampire dancers to further exertions. As they spun around the chamber, in which mounted upon the walls were rotten gray tapestries that had become part of the decor of swamp decay and twisted vines that had burst their way through from the outside, they became almost indistinguishable from each other, their blood-fed bodies merging one with another in the blurring of their motion.

Lawson smoked his cigar and watched the dancers. He was aware that at the center of the chamber, and at the center of the ring of bodies, was a single chair. And in that chair was roped the body of a woman, dressed in dirty clothes, with a black hood over her head. The head was slumped forward, the body slack.

“Is that…Eva?” Ann whispered. “
Dead
?”

“I don’t know,” Lawson answered, though he expected the worst. The Dark Society was not going to allow any of them to walk out of here.

The blonde female vampire who wore Ann’s cap suddenly came out of the ring, grinning and whirling around and around like a human top. She got up close to Ann and stopped her motion, and she smelled Ann’s hair and neck and in the next instant her body shivered with desire and her mouth opened wide. Her lower jaw unhinged, the fangs slid out and her eyes of cornflower blue flamed with bloodneed as she gripped the back of Ann’s neck and thrust her mouth toward the woman’s throat.

Before Ann could react, Lawson shot the creature in the side of her head. The noise of the shot made the music abruptly skreech to a halt and the ring of dancers froze in their steps. As the blonde vampire staggered back, her mouth open in an O of shock and her body already beginning to break apart and burn from the inside out, Lawson calmly plucked the jockey’s cap from the thing’s head. He gave it to Ann, and said, “Ready your six, but don’t move.”

The vampire’s long blonde hair caught fire and sizzled away in a matter of seconds. Her face rippled and turned black as it burned. She clutched at her throat as if recalling the moment of her turning, and as she spun around and around in a mad and agonized parody of the dance her eyes sank inward and burst into black pools that bubbled and smoked before they became dried craters, her burned facial features imploded, and her head began to wither like a grape left out in the blazing sun. From the ruin of the mouth and the collapsing throat came a piercing scream of rage. Lawson had heard such a scream before, but he knew this sight and this sound must be nearly knocking Ann to her knees. With the passage of four more seconds, an empty green gown stained dark with old blood fell upon a pile of ashes and a pair of ashy brown shoes.

Silence ruled.

It was broken by someone clapping.

“Impressive!” said a man from amid the ring. “Im…
pressive
!” He continued clapping as he came forward, easily, without fear, from the throng. “I had heard you had a weapon that…shall we say…gave you an advantage, but
this
…ah, quite a show!”

“Thank you,” Lawson replied. He kept his drawn Colt, the one with the grip of yellow bone, ready at his side. “Would you like to see another example of it?”

“No need! Let’s just call it a nice magic trick, eh?” He stopped and spread his arms wide. “Well, brother Lawson…how do you like my town?”

“A little damp,” said Lawson. “A little musty. I think it’s just a matter of time before it slides into the swamp.”

“True,” Christian Melchoir replied. He frowned, and with a toe of a black boot prodded at the empty green gown and the ashes of a dead vampire. “Painfully true. But it won’t happen this night! This night…we celebrate!”

“Celebrate what?”

“Your homecoming. Your chance to rejoin your
tribe
, sir. And look, you’ve brought us a peace offering. Musicians!” Melchoir turned toward them. “Please keep playing! Everyone, dance as you like! We are here to bring brother Lawson back into our fold, so please…make him feel welcome!” As the musicians began scratching out a tune again, Melchoir grinned at his new guests. “Did you tell this blood-puppet everything? Did you
prepare
her? Oh, that must have been quite the moment!”

Lawson was content to say nothing and smoke his cigar. He was taking stock of Christian Melchoir. The man was tall and lean and dressed in a swamp-stained gray suit with a dark blue shirt and a lighter blue paisley waistcoat. He appeared to be about twenty-five years old, his pale face smooth and unlined. He had curly black hair and a high-cheekboned face with a long angular nose and a cleft in his chin. His grin was ferocious and hungry, his eyes cool gray under gracefully-arched eyebrows. He gazed from Lawson to Ann and back again, as a few of the vampires continued their dance around the woman in the chair and the others watched the confrontation with a nervous interest, for the sudden extermination of the blonde vampire had served to focus their attention on a small item of mortality they had forgotten about in their present condition.

“Well,” said Lawson, as he blew smoke into the steamy air. “I’ve come to pay you the ransom you requested. First I want to see Eva’s face.”

“We’ll get to that, if you insist upon it.”

“I want Eva back.” Ann aimed her Remington at Melchoir’s head. The gun was miraculously steady, though her voice was certainly not. “I want her untied
now
.”

“Tell your pretty,” said Melchoir with a fixed smile, “that she does not give orders here. And please lower that gun before anyone else is damaged.” He motioned toward someone amid the watchers. A bald, big-shouldered and barrel-chested vampire in a filthy white shirt and black trousers walked a few steps to Eva’s side, slid a derringer from his pocket and placed the little pistol’s barrel against her right temple. The body stirred and the head gave a startled jerk.

“She has come to no harm
yet
,” Melchoir went on. “We want
you
, Lawson. Of course you know that. Very brave of you to come here, but why bring a blood-puppet?”

“She’s the girl’s sister. I couldn’t stop her.”

“Not so good with the powers of persuasion then, are you?” Melchoir came forward two more paces before he stopped again, warily eyeing Ann’s six-shooter and Lawson’s Colts, the one in his hand and the other still holstered. “We have thirty-eight of us here tonight,” he offered. “Um…pardon me, thirty-seven now. Do you have that many of those magic bullets in your guns? I don’t think so. You can destroy some of us, surely. But…” He opened his mouth wide to show his fangs, which were particularly large and curved. “These will win,” he said when the fangs had slid back into their sockets again. “Eventually, they will win everything.”

“First you built a town that slid into the muck. Now you want to build a world?”

“We want to keep our Society alive and…healthy, so to speak. That means…well, you
know
what it means.”

Lawson did. It meant the blood hunts by night and the destruction of one farmhouse family after another…and the destruction of one small town after another…and more and more, until…when?…the end of time? He spewed out a slow crawl of smoke. “That’s where you and I differ,” he said. He took stock of the chamberful of vampires, as the music continued to play and the dancers ringed around the girl in the chair. There were too many to shoot; even as fast as he was, he couldn’t kill them all. He thought:
If you’re gonna jump into that fryin’
pan…

“My town,” said Melchoir. “Our world. You can still be part of it, Lawson. There’s no need for your dubious quest.”

“There’s a need.”

Melchoir gave a slight and menacing smile that quickly faded. “You can’t go back. You can only go forward, as what you are. Don’t you understand that yet?”

“I understand I’m not like
you
yet. Before I get there, I’ll—”

“Shoot yourself with one of those bullets?” Melchoir came another two paces nearer. Lawson noted that two vampires—an older, rugged-looking man and a young dark-haired woman—were edging closer on the left, and on the right were two young males, also getting closer. All of them wore filthy clothes stained with the gore of many victims. “Shouldn’t you do that now, then, and save yourself some time?”

“I’ll wait,” said Lawson. Beside him, Ann still held the six-shooter aimed at Melchoir, though she was also aware of the four creatures converging on them.

“My father used to say that to me.” Melchoir’s face had become tight, his cheekbones standing out in relief in the pallid, yellowish flesh. “In that great big white house on the river. He used to say…‘Christian, you should shoot yourself now and save yourself some time’. Wasn’t that so very kind of him? Well…I showed him what I was made of. I stood up to him. Many times I did. And when he said I was a failure and I would always be a failure, I said I would show him I could not only beat him to the ground in the business…but I would do it from a town I had built from impossible earth. Nocturne, my night song. My great creation.” The tight face tried to smile, but it was only a strained half-smile and it was terribly ugly. “You have come home, Lawson. We want to embrace you.”

“I’m sure you do,” said Lawson, who watched the four vampires coming ever nearer. Lawson decided to wait no longer. He shot one of the two young males in the head, and as the music halted again and the throng watched in horrified fascination the creature burned away in his nasty clothes and fell to ashes. On the left, the older male vampire propelled itself forward with incredible speed. Ann fired a shot at the thing but put a hole only in the far wall because the monster had become nearly invisible. As it fell upon Ann and its fangs slid out toward her throat, Lawson shot it just above the left eye and it gave a high-pitched shriek and staggered back, its face already darkening and beginning to ripple and implode.

“Everyone stay calm,” said Christian Melchoir, as ashes flew about the chamber and more dirty and blood-stained clothes littered the floor.

Lawson threw one of his saddlebags at Melchoir’s feet. “Your payment in gold is there. Count it if you please, it’s in a leather pouch. We’re taking Eva Kingsley, and we’re leaving.”

“Are you, now?”

Lawson clenched the cigar between his teeth, the Colt with the bone handle gripped in his right hand. “We are. Move aside.”

Melchoir lifted his hands, and moved aside.

“Walk with me,” Lawson quietly told Ann. “Don’t stumble. Don’t fall.” It was the advice he would have given anyone who found themselves in a snakepit. He moved forward and she went with him as close as a second skin.

“You are wrong to be hunting LaRouge,” Melchoir said as they passed him. “She doesn’t like it. None of us like the fact that you are murdering your own kind. She demands that you cease your pointless wanderings and fully join us, or you will have to be destroyed.”

Lawson said nothing. He and Ann were nearing the circle.

“Let them pass,” said Melchoir, and they opened a place for Lawson and Ann to enter. Once they were within the circle, it closed again. The big vampire with the derringer moved to one side, and Lawson thought he would have to kill this one next.

Ann rushed to her sister. The body in the chair trembled, as if with anticipation.

Lawson said, “
Wait.”
The sound of his voice stopped Ann from touching the black hood. He came over beside her, and when he was there the figure in the chair began to smoothly stand up and the ropes that had been loosely tied but not knotted fell away and the slim hands rose up to remove the black hood, and there…

…there stood before him the creature with waves of black hair and the beautiful face of a fallen angel. She was still regal in her evil; she still wore it grandly and proudly, though this night she did not wear crimson yet her black eyes held crimson in their depths like pools of flame.

“Hello, Trevor,” LaRouge whispered, smiling faintly as she glided toward him. “I think you’ve been looking for me?”

Lawson’s first impulse was to lift his gun to her head…but he did not, for he
could
not. She was his death-in-life and his life-in-death, and he could not send her whirling away into fire and ash. Not, at least, until he had drained her black ichor…

“My sister!” Ann’s voice was frantic. “Where’s my sister?”

“Turned,” said Christian Melchior, who had come into the circle at their back. “And turned
out
. Lawson…you had to know we weren’t going to give her over to you. You came here hoping to find LaRouge. Isn’t that true? And
why
? To destroy her? Or to join with her?”

Lawson stood his ground as LaRouge’s face neared his. Her hand came out and stroked his cheek. “Beautiful boy,” she whispered. “Never aging. Strong and fierce, forever. Living wild and free. You have been searching for me, not because you desire to kill me,
non
.” Her fingers moved across his lips. “Because you desire
me
,” she said. “There is no going back to what you were. That is a foolish dream, and not your destiny.” Her tongue, black as a serpent’s spine, came out and licked along his jawline. “Your destiny is here with us, Trevor. With
me
. I am fascinated by your fight against what you are, and what you will become. I’ve never known anyone like you. But you have been so…so
disobedient
. So
naughty
. Killing your own kind, and
why
? You are no longer human, Trevor. Accept that. It will be so much better.”

Lawson managed to speak, with an effort. “I am…still human. I
am
.”

“No, you are not,” she whispered in his ear. “You are much more than human. And in time…when you give yourself fully over…you will learn to be a
god
.”

A gun was cocked.

The barrel of a Remington pistol was placed against LaRouge’s head.

Slowly, as if enmeshed in the most hideous dream, Lawson reached up and pushed the barrel away.

LaRouge smiled.

“We will turn this one together,” she told him. “Or would you rather kill her now? I’ll let you decide. But please make a quick decision, because I am very hungry.”

Lawson felt the conflicting tides move within him. He smelled the blood of ages on LaRouge’s breath. He smelled the ruination of souls and the dirt of the grave. A
god
, he thought. Able to live forever, strong and fierce. Forever young, at least in appearance…forever wild and free.

She was right there, in front of him, and she was offering him eternity as she knew it to be.

With a slow hand he unbuttoned his black coat.

Then he unbuttoned his crimson waistcoat.

With the burning end of his Marsh-Wheeling he lit the end of the fuse that was revealed. The fuse was connected to eight sticks of dynamite, four on each side, in a small leather harness that hung around his neck and against his shirt. It was what he’d asked Father Deale to procure for him, before he left New Orleans. He could image the priest asking to buy eight sticks of dynamite from a supplier. But Father Deale was nothing if not persuasive, and the items had been waiting for him in a box at the front desk.

The fuse sparked and sizzled.

LaRouge looked at it, her eyes widening. There was enough explosive to blow her and every creature in this chamber to pieces that could never, ever find their way back together again.

Lawson said, “I came here plenty oiled up.”

“
What
?” LaRouge whispered, rage beginning to surface in her voice.

He looked at Ann.

“Get out,” he said, and handed her the second Colt. “However you can.”

Then Lawson grabbed hold of LaRouge, pinning her arms at her sides, and in that instant when all the vampires of the Dark Society were stunned by a man who had chosen death over undeath, he let his own rage rise up from the depths. His mouth opened, the lower jaw unhinged and the fangs slid out, and he bit into LaRouge’s throat where the ichor ran black and thick. He tasted her, the most bitter wine he had ever sipped, and then he drank her in great swallows. By his estimation he had less than a minute before the fuse burned to the first stick.

Many things happened at once, in the wake of this shock. LaRouge fought wildly. She was strong, and as she hissed and struggled she and Lawson staggered left and right as if locked in their own dance. Some of the vampires drew back and others rushed forward. Ann shot the burly bald vampire in the head, aimed a shot at Melchoir and missed because he was already a moving blur advancing on her. Another shot missed again, even at a range of only a few feet, and then Ann was running for the nearest window. An arm caught her around the neck and pulled her back, and as she twisted to face her attacker she saw it was not Melchoir but a young boy who might have been sixteen years old, his tangled hair the color of sawdust, his face bony and his eyes aflame. Dried blood caked the front of his blue-checked shirt. His fangs strained for her throat, and she put the Remington up under his chin and fired into his head the fifth of her six silver angels in that cylinder.

Melchoir had abandoned his attack on Ann Kingsley for bigger game.

He hit Lawson like a steam engine. In spite of that, Lawson held onto LaRouge and his gun and continued to drink, as the fuse burned down and the seconds ticked past and LaRouge tried to get her arms up to throw him aside or plunge her claws into his eyes but she could not.

As the vampires came at Ann with tremendous speed, she fired the last of her Remington’s ammunition into their midst and then opened up with the Colt. Two of them were hit and began to sizzle and break apart, which made the others draw back. Ashes flew in the flickering yellow light, but there were too many. The window was at Ann’s back; she was about to jump, and then she froze as she witnessed a transformation from a nightmare world.

Christian Melchoir was changing. His body color darkened, like that of a chameleon on a gray rock. His skin rippled into scales. His forehead thickened, his jaw lengthened, his hands became knotty claws. Something twitched and moved at his back, under his gray suit coat. His body became thickly muscular in a span of seconds. With the ripping of cloth two ebony wings burst from beneath his shirt and waistcoat and suit coat, and unfolding they made him appear to be a huge gnarled and muscular bat, even as his head seemed to sink into his shoulders and his face became animalish, his mouth opening and the fangs tearing at the air.

She fired a silver angel at him, but he was already gone.

Melchoir hit Lawson with a force that lifted the vampire gunslinger off his feet and tore him away from LaRouge, leaving grooves in her flesh that leaked the ink-black ichor. He lost his hold on his pistol and it skidded away across the planks. LaRouge staggered back as Melchoir’s claws closed around Lawson’s shoulders and bit into the flesh, and just that quickly the bat-creature’s wings beat the air and thrust both of them through a window on the other side of the room, out of the ruined mansion and into the night before Ann could take aim again.

LaRouge’s burning gaze fell upon Ann Kingsley.

Ann lifted the Colt to fire. She was aware of blurred shapes coming at her from all sides, aware that she could get off one shot before the others took her.

She remembered Lawson saying, as if pleading it to himself,
I am still human
.
I am
.

Ann turned to the left and shot a thin, ragged and gray-haired female vampire who’d been just about to reach her. The woman gave a shrill cry of what might have been terror as she blackened and broke apart, her eyes bursting like blisters and a gout of blue fire coming from her mouth.

Ann had an instant to see LaRouge advancing on her, grinning like a death’s-head, and then Ann turned and jumped through the window into the swamp below.

In the air over Nocturne, Lawson twisted his body around to grab hold of the shape that Christian Melchoir had shifted himself into. The fuse was still sizzling; maybe he had twenty seconds. Melchoir tried to sling Lawson downward, the ebony wings beating furiously, but Lawson hung on. They spun in a mad circle, another crazed dance in midair. Lawson made an attempt to get his body up onto Melchoir’s shoulders, but the wings beat at him and the creature was too strong.

Lawson’s back slammed into something that nearly broke his spine. Melchoir had crashed him into the church’s steeple. The impact made the crooked Cross topple from its mount into the water thirty feet below. Melchoir pulled him back again, and once more rammed Lawson into the steeple with a force that cracked ribs and made the gunslinger cry out with pain. The third time Lawson was crashed against the steeple, a clawed hand reached down and crushed out the burning fuse. Lawson grasped hold of the steeple’s roof tiles and strained for breath as the bat-creature in Melchoir’s clothes hovered before him in triumph, its wings thrashing the air.

“My town,” came the ragged, otherworldly voice from the distorted vocal cords. “Our world.”

“Wrong,” Lawson rasped, his back and ribs pulsing with pain. “You’re about to leave…both of them.” As he hung onto the steeple with one arm, he lifted the pearl-handled derringer he’d taken from its pocket inside his coat.

Lawson fired a silver bullet into the creature’s head just below the right eye. The shot echoed out into the night.

Melchoir’s wings drew him backward. As the body convulsed and the red fissures broke open and the vampire’s life essence was destroyed by the silver and the holy water, one wing collapsed while the other continued to beat, which put Melchoir in a circle going around and around the steeple. Lawson lay back, nearly exhausted, the bitter taste of LaRouge’s ichor in his mouth and the veins of his body itching as if coming back to life, his face feverish, his nerves on fire.

He watched Christian Melchoir burn. Watched the face collapse inward. The eyes remained fixed upon him, it seemed, until they burst and ran in rivulets down the cheeks. The mouth was open in a soundless oath of surprise. Lawson watched the chest and arms and back shrivel, watched the wings crumble to ash and fall away, and then the smoking torso and the misshapen head still with a mat of crisped hair turned to ashes, and all that was left of the creator of Nocturne and the savior of the creature called LaRouge fell into the swamp along with his clothing.

Lawson listened.

There was no more music here.

He could still see candlelight in the mansion beyond. If Ann had been taken…

He didn’t wish to think about that. He didn’t wish to think. He had lost his prized Stetson, which made him a little angry. He had one more cigar, and luckily this had survived being fully crushed. He had several more friction matches. He decided he would have a smoke, if he could risk blowing up his dynamite waistcoat. It was a risk worth taking. He was still alive; he meant to stay that way, as long as he could, but he did enjoy a good cigar. His movements were slow and labored, but at least he
could
move.

Yes, there was music, after all.

The sound of the swamp rose up to him. The sound of frogs and crickets, of birds and ’gators, of life in every puddle and pond and knothole and leaf.

Nothing came after him. He lay against the crooked dunce-cap steeple and smoked his cigar and relished for a moment his safety. He could see the blue shimmer of the stars. He could also see, to the east, the faint glow of the sunrise.

Lawson smiled grimly. Caught on a church steeple, with maybe three or four broken ribs and a spine that had nearly been snapped. Caught here with the sun coming up and eight sticks of dynamite on his chest. Father Deale would get a good laugh out of this one.

There was still enough fuse left to blow himself up, if he pleased. There was one more silver bullet in the derringer. He could go that way too, if he wished.

He would think about that, he decided, when he finished his cigar. And maybe he would watch the sun rise, as well. Burn his eyes out with its beauty, this last time.

He heard a distant voice, calling “Christian? Christian?”

It was a woman’s voice, accented with French.
Her
voice. “Christian?” she called, a third time. But no one answered, and LaRouge ceased calling because she had heard the shot and must’ve known he was dead.

Would they leave the party now? Lawson wondered. Get in their boats and go away? And go where? Or would they hide here in the daylight and leave when the sun sank again? He could imagine them going back in a little armada to whatever swamp town they’d conquered and consumed, and from there out into all points of the compass, out into the Big Country with all it promised for the vampire, out into the world of ordinary mortals and unsuspecting humans who knew nothing of the Dark Society and so were unprepared when they came in the night.

After awhile a man called for Christian, again from the distance. And once more, with a little chill of fear in the voice: “
Christian
?”

He is not here, Lawson thought. He is no longer among you. But I am still here, and I am not leaving yet.

Lawson watched the stars fade and the night turn ruddy to the east. He explored his sensations of broken ribs and bruised spine. There was a great deal of pain. It would fade in time—three or four days, maybe—as everything healed, but right now the pain was fierce. He chewed on the end of his cold stogie and considered that pain was the human’s friend; it taught lessons, if one embraced it as a hard taskmaster. But one could learn from such lessons, and Lawson intended not to let them go unheeded.

He did not wish to die in this half-life, in this half-world between vampires and humanity. The sunlight was harsher to them than to he, so…yes…they would be hiding somewhere near, and likely had already begun preparations for their daytime sleep.

Soon he was going to have to decide what to do. Time advanced; the sun was coming up as a scarlet fireball through the cypress trees and weeping willows. He felt its early heat in the still and steamy air. He felt its power prickling his skin. In another hour or so it would be as if the fiery hand of God was pressed against him. He was going to have to find some shelter, if he had to crawl into the church’s belltower and curl up there around his broken ribs.