The Light at the End (34 page)

“
No!
” Rudy screamed, awakening from the nightmare into the harsh light of Stephen’s apartment. For a second, it was all still there: the black smoke, the puckering holes, the rain like lava. Then the dream pictures were gone, and he was staring at the wall, and the clock put the time at exactly 3:07.

“Shit,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes. Weird jagged-edged patterns flew across the darkness behind his eyelids. He opened his eyes. The pattern danced and hovered in the air.

I gotta get home
. The thought came unbidden, fighting its way through the fog in his mind. It pinged there like a clapper striking the bulls-eye bell at a shooting gallery.
I gotta get home
. An echo of certainty. A tightness in his chest that left no room for doubt.

Something was wrong at his apartment. He could feel it, he could taste it, like a hot copper penny at the tip of his tongue.

Rudy jumped to his feet, rushed toward the door, and stopped.
There isn’t time!
his mind screamed. Harsh statement of fact. In his mind’s eye, he could see himself running down the street. He could see himself, arriving too late.

The thought filled him with billowing, shapeless terror.
What is it? What’s happening? What am I gonna do?
His mind reeled, like a severed tire rolling crazily down a steep embankment. He turned away from the door, staggered toward the window, threw it open and stood before it, pulled by an instinct he didn’t even begin to understand.

I gotta get home
, he thought once again…

*

…
and suddenly he was flying, the air whipping past him as he rose up over the skyline on leathery wings. And though he had never seen the city from this angle, through these blind eyes, he knew where he was going. He knew how to get there. Some inner system of guidance, indigenous to the form he had taken, zeroed in on the target unerringly.

While his tiny lungs and sharp-fanged mouth pierced the night with a chittering song.

To the left of the front steps, smothered in shadow, T.C. Williams lit his twenty-third and final cigarette of the night. He was thinking about his children, his ex-wife, his family and friends. He was thinking about what it would be like to see them shambling, undead, through the streets of Harlem. He was thinking about how much he loved them… how he’d die before he ever allowed that to happen. All that, as his eyes combed the street.

He didn’t think to look skyward.

He never even saw it coming.

When Rudy was finished with the wet, broken thing, he left it in the shadows and started racing up the steps to his apartment. Fresh blood coursing through him, his human shape restored, his body felt strong as an athlete’s in training; but his mind was still chaotic, bubbling over with panic.

Above him, on the third floor landing, Armond Hacdorian was gingerly opening the broken front door to Rudy’s apartment. It was a difficult task for a man his age. He was uncomfortably aware of the pounding in his chest. A short jolt of pain in his left shoulder startled him; his vision swam for a moment, and the door slipped from between his fingers.

They heard each other at almost exactly the same time: Rudy’s pounding footsteps, coming up off the second floor landing just as the door hit the wall, slid, and crashed at Armond’s feet.

Rudy let out a tiny shriek of terror and raced madly up the last flight of stairs. Armond backed slowly into the room and reached a trembling hand into his bag, coming up with several vials of holy water.

Both of them were praying that it wasn’t too late.

Rudy rounded the last corner and stopped short, panting. The door was open, and a faint light was playing across the floor of the landing. He edged toward it nervously. His forehead began to ache.

“
Son of a bitch
,” he whispered. Two feet short of the door, he moved to the wall and edged along it like a spy in a hoky forties melodrama. Something was happening in there that terrified him, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

Then a splash and a hiss, and the glow from the doorway increased in brilliance, and it seemed as if the walls themselves were beginning to moan now with an agonized life of their own. Something about it nagged at the back of his head, telling him that
this
was the horror he’d come to avert. Quickly, then… desperately… he leapt through the doorway.

And fell back, hissing.

Blind.

“Ah, Rudy. You’ve come.” Armond seemed genuinely pleased. “I was afraid we’d lost you.”

“You’ll
wish
you had, you bastard!” Rudy howled, averting his eyes and sidestepping painfully forward. “What are you doing to my
room?
”

“Not your room anymore, Rudy” Armond smiled. “Never again.”

The light was coming from the old man’s hands: from the tiny glass vials in his trembling grip. Already, the back wall was spattered with radiance. Now Armond sent a thick sprinkling shower of it out in an arc before him, neatly bisecting the floor, cutting a thin line of protection between himself and the vampire.

To his eyes, the floorboards seemed to sputter and steam, as though the holy water had become a highly corrosive acid. But to Rudy, yowling now with rage and terror, it was the stuff of his dreams: thick green-black plumes of smoke, gushing from a thousand tiny puckering craters, miniature volcanoes too bright to look at, opening up at his feet like sores on a ripe, deceased body.

“YOU BASTARD!” Rudy screamed. “I’LL KILL YOU!”

Armond smiled. He didn’t know what Rudy was seeing, but he knew that it was far more intense than what his own eyes revealed. He intensified it further, crisscrossing the first line with another. It opened up the right side of the room for him, let him get closer to the door, while Rudy screeched and jumped back toward the far left corner.

“I’m not afraid of you, Rudy,” he said. “I’ve seen human beings commit crimes against God that you will never rival in a million years. By comparison, they make you seem quite puny.” He let the empty vial shatter on the floor, quickly uncapped another. “Like a troublesome child,” he continued.

A plan was forming in his mind. He hadn’t thought of it before… hadn’t really expected Rudy to show up at all… but now that he thought of it, it just might be the final solution to their problems.

If I can trap him in here
, he thought,
we’ll have won. Either Joseph can come and enjoy his moment of glory, or we can leave Rudy for the morning sun. Either way, it will be over.

If only I can trap him.

It didn’t seem to be too difficult: Rudy was still backed up in the corner, hissing, and Armond had a clear shot to the door. But the pain thudded again in his left shoulder, making the world gray out for a long cold second. And when he snapped back out of it, he felt himself gripped with a mortal terror that had nothing to do with Rudy.

“Please,” he heard himself praying. “Please, no.” The confidence began to seep out of him like water from a leaky-glass. Another jolt hit him, and he staggered back slightly. When he looked up, he saw that Rudy had moved closer to the door.

There’s still time
, he thought desperately.
If I can only
…

Then it hit him like a wrecking ball, his chest seeming to explode with fiery agony, his knees buckling, his bowels releasing. The room disappeared; in its place, there was
pain
, unimaginable pain, tearing through him like earthquake fissures in a tortured earth. He didn’t feel his hands open convulsively, didn’t hear the vials of holy water shattering around him. He didn’t realize that he was falling, the floorboards racing up to meet him. He didn’t even know when he hit.

But when Rudy’s teeth punched in through the soft tissue at the jugular vein, he knew.

The pain was incredible. A second that stretched forever, racing over the white light barrier, feeling it burn up through the soles of his feet and go zzzzzzztttttt! through his nervous system like a lightning bolt. Then it was over, and he was dropping to his knees over little fucking Grampa, rolling the wrinkled old bastard over, watching the savage spasms that made Armond Hacdorian dance like a bug on a pin.

“Now,” Rudy said. “It’s
your
turn to be scared.” And he bared his fangs. And he sank them in…

…
and he was on the speed-of-thought roller coaster of Armond Hacdorian’s dying mind, racing back through history and the experiences of a lifetime, getting spitfire glimpses of the years, ticking backwards, a film in reverse, with a camera eye that missed nothing, missed nothing…

…and he saw himself as Armond had seen him, experiencing the revulsion as if it were his own, hating himself and wishing only to plunge a stake through the heart of a Rudy Pasko that was suddenly not himself, but a terrible and demonic other…

…and then the calendar pages flipped back over years like dross, mere filler between consequential events, a long, long stretch of mundane struggle for survival that dragged on and on and on, in reverse…

…and there was a mounting descent into madness, converse of the recuperative process undergone by an Armond Hacdorian who had aged far, far beyond his years, young by time’s standards but never to be young again…

…and then he was watching Treblinka, in flames…

Rudy wanted to pull away from the convulsing body beneath him.
I’m not afraid of you, Rudy
, the old man had said. He didn’t want to see things more horrible than his wildest dreams. He wanted to pull away.

But he couldn’t.

…
and the walls were burning, the towers were burning, there were bodies twisting and shouting on their feet to the syncopated groove of machine-gun fire, bodies crisping and smoldering at his feet, bodies cutting frantic swaths across the smoky landscape as they raced toward freedom in the form of death or the woods beyond…

…and there were bodies in the trenches, tens of thousands of them, meticulously stacked, the thin ones arranged at the bottom like kindling, the fat ones on top, so that the mass incineration might operate at peak efficiency in these, the final days of the camp, all evidence of the slaughter reduced to fine gray ash and hidden forever from the eyes of Man…

…and Rudy was a passenger in Armond’s mind, a prisoner in his body, helplessly reliving an atrocity many years past, standing at the edge of a trench, systematically transferring the deadweight of murdered child after murdered child from the pile behind him to the pit before him, where even less fortunate men crawled over the bodies already laid down to receive the new ones and painstakingly arrange them while the Nazis looked on, unspeakably cold and calculating and brutal, shouting out orders and dealing out blows to the shrunken, emaciated, subhuman drones who scurried and moaned and averted their hollow eyes as they handled their dead like sacks of garbage, loading them in and spreading them out…

…and they were leading him down “The Road to Heaven,” that pebble-strewn path from the processing section to the gas chambers to the trenches…

…
and they were coming for him in the green section, where the clothes of the new arrivals were sorted, beating him to his knees in front of the large bins where the sweaters were separated from the shirts and blouses…

…and he was in the slave barracks, his son crushed tight to his bosom, and his son had a great purple welt below one eye, and any mark on the face was instantly translated into a trip to the “hospital,” and a bullet to the back of the neck… and so he gave his son a boost, the young man tying the other end of the rope around a broad wooden rafter, and then his son’s legs did a shuffling tap dance of death, two feet above the floor…

…and his wife was running naked down “The Road to Heaven”…

…and in the last moment of Armond Hacdorian’s life, he flipped forward once again to the end of Treblinka, and he had the machine gun in his hands, and the Nazis were jerking like disco dancers under a strobe light, and one particular pale Aryan face stared back at him in horror, and the face was unmistakably familiar…

Rudy came up screaming, his teeth tearing away from the lifeless throat beneath him with a sound like shredding paper. Blood spurted, steaming, from the open wound. There was still quite a bit of blood left in the body.

Armond Hacdorian would not be back.

Under any other circumstances, Rudy would have been furious. Three times, now, he had been cheated of victory, tripped up at the finish line: first by Ian, then by Stephen and the one who called himself Master, and now by this one. Under any other circumstances, he would have been smashing down the walls.

But his mind’s eye was still focused on a single image, dangling before him like a freeze-frame at the end of a movie. The last thing he saw before Armond died and took his nightmare visions with him. The only thing that Rudy could see.

That was me
, a voice informed him.
That was my face
…

Then a sound like a busy signal pried its way into his consciousness, slipping in gradually, chiseling away at the picture until he was back in his apartment, in his body, looking dumbly for the source of the noise…

And finding it in the dead man’s pocket.

Whafuck?
he thought, fingering the cold metal and plastic of the beeper. His thumb slid over the button and silenced it, quite by accident.
Why would an old man be carrying a thing like this?
he wondered, rolling it over and over in his hands like a stymied puzzle-freak with a Rubik’s Cube.

Rudy pondered it for a full minute before the sharp pains in his forehead reminded him of where he was, what had happened. Distantly, he heard the sound of approaching sirens. Absently, he pocketed the beeper and pulled himself to his feet. Their soles throbbed, the pain punctuating his every step.

Without a backward glance at his light-spoiled sanctuary, Rudy Pasko moved quickly down the stairs, out into the morning’s final hours of darkness.

It was now 3:45.

By 4:15, Brenner had seen just about enough.

The body out front was pretty grim, just for starters: throat laid open, left arm wrenched loose and dangling, a series of vicious clawmarks on his shoulders and the back of his neck. The victim’s name was Terrence C. Williams, He left a sizable corpse. Evidently, he’d been working for the Transit Authority, judging from the receipts and check-cashing card in his wallet.

But he’d been carrying a messenger bag when he died. It was identical, in style and contents, to the one they’d found with the remains of Claire Cunningham.

That was for starters. Then he had gone up the stairs and found the old man, Hacdorian. The body wasn’t mangled, at least… though there was no getting around the puncture wounds in the neck… but his simple presence there was both illuminating and disturbing. Brenner remembered Hacdorian well: the man who remembered nothing. Apparently, he’d remembered enough to get himself killed.

Armond Hacdorian carried no messenger bag, but he did have a satchel with a large cross inside it, identical to the others. And it wasn’t too hard to figure out what all those little glass vials had contained.

After that, he’d studied the writing on the wall, the pile of tiny bones in the corner. There was a terrible torn moment, where the exhilaration almost overwhelmed the revulsion. He fought it down.
Neither the time nor the place, he thought, for a celebration.