The Light at the End (20 page)

*

“So where were you plannin’ on goin’, man?” Ian had caught up with Stephen in the doorway and taken him gently by the shoulder from behind.

“Leave me alone,” Stephen practically whimpered, feebly trying to pull away.
I see what Joseph meant about this kid being a wimp
, Ian thought, but he kept it to himself.

“Look. You’re the one who got us all together, right?” Stephen nodded hesitantly. “Well, you don’t wanna run out on your own party, do ya?” Stephen shot him a sidelong glance that was crawling with terror.

“Yeah, Joseph’s a scary guy, all right.” Ian put as much empathy in his voice as he could muster. “But he’s been through a lot lately… you wouldn’t believe how much… and he doesn’t really want to hurt you. He just wants to get at this Rudy character, you know?”

Stephen started to say something, then clammed up again. He looked like somebody’d dipped his nuts in a hot bowl of soup.

“Aw, come on,” Ian urged. “Say it. I don’t want to beat you up or anything, I just want to hear what you have to say. That’s all anybody wants. It seems like you know more about Rudy than anybody else; and I, for one, would be much obliged if you’d share some of the knowledge with us.”

Stephen finally looked away from his feet and brought his gaze up to meet Ian’s. The tears were just biding their time behind the eyelids, ready to roll at any moment. But behind the fear and the sadness… it was obvious to Ian that both were a factor here… there was also a dawning element of trust. Stephen had seen who grabbed Joseph’s arm in the nick of time; and he knew who Joseph would listen to, if anyone.

“You won’t let him punch me out?” Stephen asked. It was almost a plea.

“Not a chance,” Ian said, and hoped to God that it was true.

Slowly, Stephen let Ian lead him back to the table. Neither one of them noticed the figure that watched, with keen interest, from the street.

*

Allan was not happy. He was not happy when he came in, he’d become slightly
less
happy when Josalyn had first broken down in tears, and he had been getting less and less happy ever since.

In fact, the only thing that could have cheered Allan up would have been a telegram from God, informing him that the last several days had been a bad dream, and that he’d be waking up shortly. That, or the sudden admission by everyone present that the whole thing had been an elaborate gag, a practical joke with a punch line so boffo that it took a week of misery to build up to.

As it stood, he saw neither option looming up on the horizon. Instead, he found himself surrounded by people who had either blown a fuse or tiptoed into the
Twilight Zone
. Either way, it sucked the imperial whanger.

And the worst of it was, Joseph and Ian were right square in the middle of it. No
way
were they going to back off now. Not when they’d stumbled onto so much affirmation.
Christ
, he thought, decidedly unhappy,
I couldn’t restrain them now with twenty feet of chain and a ten-ton weight.

A damp and clammy silence had fallen over the table, sporadically broken by tiny sounds from Josalyn. She seemed to be alternating between sighs, sobs, and giggles at this point. Her head was in her hands, and she was shaking it a lot.

Joseph sullenly nursed his beer. He kept glancing in the direction that Stephen and Ian disappeared from, then back down at his hands. When he felt Allan’s gaze upon him, he looked over for a moment; and Allan thought that he saw a trace of apology there, mixed in with the customary impatience and rage. Then Joseph looked away again.

As for the other two: Danny and Claire were staring off into space, no particular expressions on their faces at all. They were obviously uncomfortable.
And who wouldn’t be
, Allan observed,
sitting at a table where someone is losing her mind?

He took a pinch of Captain Black from its pouch, tamped it into his pipe with fingers that felt numb and weighted with lead. Everything about the place… the dim light, the dark wood, the ghostly strains of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper” wafting over from the jukebox… seemed calculated to feed the atmosphere of gloom that enveloped them.

Suddenly, Joseph leaned forward slightly, and his eyes brightened. Allan turned to look; a moment later, Stephen was sitting down beside him. Ian followed, beaming; he flashed a look at Joseph that said
be cool, man. Don’t start.
Joseph nodded almost imperceptibly, and Ian slid back into his seat.

“Okay,” Ian said. “So where were we?”

“We were talking,” Josalyn offered in a remarkably steady voice, “about Rudy being a vampire, right? We were suggesting that he’s the one who’s been killing all these people.” She paused to take a first tentative sip of her wine. The glass shook in her hand. The effort behind her control was evident.

“Well, I think it’s true,” she continued. “Now that you’ve brought it up, I think that it’s got to be true. Rudy’s either a vampire or something like it. He’s some kind of monster. He’s got to be. Otherwise, he couldn’t have done… what he did…

“To me.” The words were almost an afterthought. She had been trailing off there at the end, sinking toward inaudibility. Now her voice came back, more powerful than before. “Do you know what that fucker has done to me?” she asked. “Do you know why I’m sitting here, freaking out like this?”

A shaking of heads, grimly urging her on. She sipped again at her wine, then obliged.

“I’ve been having dreams, for the last few nights. Terrible dreams: the worst I’ve ever had. I don’t remember the first one too well, except that something came out of the grave for me…”

A discernible shiver ran through the group.

“…but the last two nights, I remember. I remember them very well.” Her face tightened into a vengeful, furious grin. Her eyes pointed down at the white knuckles of her delicate, fisted hands. The others were keyed in tightly, gauging her every word and gesture.

“For the last two nights, I’ve been raped and murdered in my sleep,” she said. Claire, in particular, jerked in reaction. “I’ve been put through Hell, in dreams so vivid that I woke up screaming. And my cat… my cat…” She would not let herself cry. She would not allow it. She stiffened, shaking her head in a rapid, staccato pattern, and quickly changed the subject.

“Anyway… last night, I finally saw his face. Just for a second, just before I woke up, but the picture was very clear in my mind.

“It was…”

“
Well, well, well!
” a new voice interjected, and a cold hand pressed its weight on Stephen’s shoulder. “What do we have here? A party?”

They looked up, startled. Josalyn froze; her pupils contracted to the size of pinpricks in a face gone suddenly paler than the bloodshot whites of her eyes. Her features slackened. Her eyes rolled up and out of commission. She teetered for a moment in her seat, then slumped against the wall in a dead faint. Nobody noticed.

They were all staring up, in varying degrees of terror and awe, at Rudy Pasko.

To Ian and Allan, the sight of Rudy set off a pair of diametrically opposed reactions. Whereas Allan found all of his skepticism dashed in a single second… logic be damned, he
knew
now that it was true… Ian took one look at that pallid, grinning countenance and said to himself,
Is that all there is to him?

To Joseph, Rudy’s presence made his hackles rise. It’s the kind of fright you get when somebody steps out of the shadows behind you: a fleeting terror, but a total one in the moment that it strikes. Even more than Stephen, he could smell the death in the air.

To Danny, it was the land of awe he’d have expected to feel if he were suddenly sucked into one of his movie posters: the sense of stepping concretely into the realm of the impossible, both feet on the ground and head suspended at a dizzying height.

To Claire, Rudy looked even more gorgeous than he had at the bar.

Stephen seemed to be shrinking under the weight of that cold hand, those luminous eyes. His face was pale, as pale as Rudy’s. The vampire grinned down at him in a mocking kind of palsy-walsy manner, and Stephen almost swallowed his tongue.

“What’s the matter, Stephen?” Rudy asked him, feigning genuine concern. “I thought you’d be glad to see me! Umm… aren’t you going to introduce me to all your nice new friends?” Stephen just stared at him, the color of Wonder Bread.

Joseph began to rise from his seat. Ian felt it coming the instant before it happened. Instinctively, the smaller man pushed his chair around so that he was facing Rudy. One leg kicked out to the right, tripping Joseph before the big man could get an inch from his seat. Joseph sat back down hard, whoofing slightly. Ian put his hand on Joseph’s arm, pinning it lightly to the table, his eyes never leaving Rudy’s face.

“So you’re Rudy, huh?” he said. “I’ve been hearing a lot about you.”

Rudy glanced over at Ian, then to Stephen, then back again. His face, which had contorted in anger for a moment, twisted itself into a calculating smile. “So you’ve been talking about me, have you, Stephen? I thought you might. How rude of you.” His eyes engaged Ian’s for a long crackling moment. Ian didn’t even flinch. “And your name was…”

“It still is. Ian.” An extended hand. A smile as phony as Rudy’s own. “Pleased ta meetcha.”

Rudy stared at the hand for a moment, perplexed.
Who the hell does this guy think he is?
Rudy wondered, unaware that Ian was thinking exactly the same thing. He regarded the hand for a moment longer, considered taking it, then dismissed the gesture entirely. “And what has our friend told you about me?”

“He hasn’t told us jack shit,” Joseph cut in angrily. He didn’t like the idea of being restrained, not even by his best friend, for all the right reasons, “We had to find out for ourselves.”

“Oh?” Rudy turned his attention to Joseph now, regarding him coolly. “And just what did you find?”

“Oh, nothing,” Ian interjected. “Nothing you don’t already know about, I’m sure. Just little mundane things, really.” He smiled sweetly, condescendingly. He was feeling the fight build up inside him, like steam in a pressure cooker, and loving every minute of it. “Nothing very interesting at all.”

Rudy didn’t like that. Like a slap in the face, it knocked him off-balance for a moment and made him come back pissed. He glowered at Ian, no trace of a smile on his face as he hissed, “You’re a smart little shit, aren’t you?”

Ian leaned forward in his seat, grinning wickedly. “That’s me,” he said, nodding. “Got that right on the nose. Coming from a squirmy little worm-faced fuck, that’s awfully darned astute.”

“
What?
” Rudy’s face reddened slightly. A burst of helpless laughter swept the table, and Rudy once again said, “
What?
”

“Hey! I thought you had X-ray hearing!” Ian griped. His smile was almost big enough to park Joseph’s van in. “What about all those amazing powers we thought you were supposed to have? Don’t tell me it isn’t true! I couldn’t bear to hear it!” He put his hands over his ears and winced comically, eyes bulging.

Rudy was stunned. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The audacity of this human exceeded all bounds. He felt like taking this Ian’s face and grinding it into the ceiling. “You’re going to be sorry…” he began.

“Oh, I already
am
!” Ian’s own ferocity had reached its head and boiled over. “Believe me. When I heard about the big bad monster that rapes and kills women, I got this mental picture of somebody who was
really impressive
, ya know? And here I find that I got all worked up over nothin’! It’s a big disappointment, let me tell ya.”

At that moment, Josalyn started to come around. Her mouth opened, a low moan escaping. All eyes turned toward her. For the first time, they noticed her unconsciousness. Terror blossomed in Ian’s heart like a mushroom cloud. Rudy smiled like the man who found Achilles’ heel.

“You like her.” A mocking pronouncement. “The high-buttoned bitch attracts you, I gather. Well, let me warn you: she likes men without backbones. She likes toadies that she can domineer…”

“She likes
your
type, I take it.” Ian had whipped around to face Rudy, no trace of a smile to mask the fury now. “She likes craven little scumbunnies who send bad dreams to do their dirty work for them. She likes peroxide pretty boys with yellow teeth and eye-liner who think they’re the baddest thing since Attila the Hun. Yeah, I can just see her quivering with desire.” All this at a steady low volume that cut all the more because of it. “Why don’t you just
piss off
, Mr. Shithead from Beyond the Grave? Why don’t you go take a sunbath and rot, like your last girlfriend did? Why… ?”

“
That’s ENOUGH!
” Rudy’s voice boomed like a gunshot in an empty basement. It carried across the room, drowning out shouting matches at the far end of the bar the way a jet plane’s landing would swallow a mosquito’s drone. There was no earthly way that Rudy’s diaphragm could generate such volume. Ian knew that, even as the sound pushed him backwards half a yard.

And the air around the table dropped thirty degrees in the space of a second.

“You’re going to die,” Rudy said…

The darkness flared up like a sudden implosion of light. Their nostrils were flooded with the stench of death, a green haze of putrescence that hung in the icy air around them. Ian glanced sharply over at his companions, and with a sledgehammer jolt of horror he saw that they were all dead, their bodies twisted at impossible angles, flesh discolored, meat exposed. His hands jerked up to his face involuntarily, then away. A scream welled up in his throat and died there, throttling.

He was staring at his hands: at the slim white cylinders of exposed bone that showed through the mangled, pitted flesh of his palms. For a second, the skin seemed to crawl of its own volition; and then he saw that they were maggots, grayish-white and puffy, burrowing in and out of him in a timeless dance of birth and consumption and death.

His second scream raced upwards, trampling the corpse of the first on its way out of his mouth. The vile, gagging flavor was heavy on his tongue, as if he’d just taken a big bite of something rotten. That was when he realized that the mouth itself was decomposing, caving in on itself, crawling with pale, bloated, carrion-eating life…

And as his scream burst out into the open air, he felt something shift behind his eyes, pushing against the backs of them.

Forcing its way through.

And his vision went blank. And his screams stretched out like a moldering tendril. And the moist horror oozed down his cheeks…

…and suddenly he was back in the room, and the others were alive, and Rudy was standing over him with a stupefied expression on his face. Sensation came rushing back in a torrent of freezing sweat that seemed to burst from every pore in his body. He rubbed his eyes quickly and gaped at Rudy, at his companions, at the solid living flesh of his hands.

“Omigod,” he breathed, staring back up at Rudy again. It struck him instantly that Rudy didn’t know what happened, either; the look of confusion on that pale, ghastly face was hysterically out-of-place.

Behind him, Joseph’s voice croaked, “What the hell did you just
do
?” The voice was phlegm-caked, numb with shock. A dull murmur came from the rest of the group, and Ian knew that they’d all just seen… something.

Ian’s gaze leveled on Rudy, He started to laugh. He tried to control it. He might as well have tried to control federal spending. “He’s like Bullwinkle!” he exclaimed, the words wiggling out of his throat like party streamers. “Hey, Rocky! Watch me p-pull a rabbit outta my h-h-
hat
!” He was laughing so hard he could barely go on. “N-n-nothin’ up muh sleeve… ha ha ha . PRESTO!” He collapsed against the table, tears streaming from his eyes, convulsed with laughter.