Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) (16 page)

“Except what?”

“I heard something about some disappearances in sixty-six.”

There it was again, 1966.

-12-

The night search churned up a lot of ground, but in the end the men were forced to face the fact they were wasting fuel and their time. At one point Loomis wanted to know why the goddamned dog was so important to Stroud. Stroud replied succinctly, “I'd like to have the dog to study. The markings on the boy were unusual. If the same animal got at the dog, maybe an expert could tell us what this so-called Andover Devil actually is.”

“Oh, so you've heard the legend,” replied Carroll.

“My house servants told me something about it.”

“Well, I'm for callin' it a night,” said Curtis, yawning.

“Andover Devil's been blamed for every poisoned cat, every lost dog, and slaughtered beef in the county,” said Carroll.

“You get a lot of that?” asked Stroud, taking a pull on a bottle of Jack Daniels that Loomis offered up. “Cut up beef, I mean.”

“Just passing hobos, bums on bikes. They'll kill a whole cow for one night's steak,” said Curtis.

“We haven't tried the caverns,” said Carroll.

“Caverns?” asked Stroud. “Oh, yeah ... seem to recall that there are some caves and caverns hereabouts.”

“They're a long ways from here, Ray. The boy was found in this area. How'd he get all the way over here if his dog and he were attacked way over at the caverns?”

“I don't know, Loomis. Just thinking out loud.”

“It's past midnight now,” said Stroud. Maybe we'd better call it a night, Ray.”

“Hell, the night's young,” said Curtis.

“We'd best head back,” said Carroll. “The wives'll be worried as it is.”

“You sure are trussed up with those apron strings, Ray!” said Curtis, laughing good-naturedly.

Loomis piped in with, “With what Ray's got at the end of those apron strings, Curtis, you'd better believe he ain't goin' far.”

Stroud felt the friendship among these men. They were good men and like himself they'd been confused by the Meyers event and the Cooper incident. They were afraid, but also afraid to show their fear; showing it, just talking about it made them jumpy. Denial was their mainstay and defense. Stroud understood such men. He'd served with such men in Vietnam.

“Let's pack up then.”

“Tomorrow maybe we'll get an earlier start, get out to the caverns,” said Carroll, “have a look around there for any signs of the dog.”

It had gone unspoken among them--they weren't here for the dog; they wanted nothing more than to locate Ronnie Cooper's remains. Stroud still believed that if there was a beast out here in the surrounding darkness, a man-eater that got its jollies from terrorizing people, that the beast, unmasked, standing naked, stripped to its skin, would be of the human variety. Most beasts were.

Stroud drove back to the manse alone, as the others all lived in a cluster of homes in a subdivision in Andover aptly named The Hamlet. They were just down from the Meyers place which faced an empty field that led to another and another until one came to the interstate. It was in one of these fields that the bones were uncovered. Stroud wondered what was being done to restore the graveyard and if it would be done haphazardly by contractors with backhoes or properly by concerned citizens of the Andover Historical Society.

He was almost to the manse when suddenly a red convertible sports car cut in front of him from nowhere, blocking his path, making him screech to a halt. In his headlights he saw that it was Pamela Carr and she wasn't wearing a white lab coat. She'd done a full one hundred and eighty degrees, dressed in a black evening gown with teasing red bra straps peeking through.

She got out of her car seductively, letting the door close behind her. She moved toward him with a look in her eye that meant he was hers. Her long colored nails curled up at him, inviting him out.

Stroud shook his head and got out of his Jeep. “Unbelievable ... unbelievable. How long've you been waiting for me to come by here?”

“Talked with your Mr. Ashyer. He told me you'd be late. I don't mind waiting if it's for a good thing.”

God, she was fast. He liked it on the one hand, but he had only known hookers in Chicago and Vietnam to be so forward, and for this reason he wasn't completely thrilled by her. And yet her eyes held him as they did that first time their eyes met, and when she reached out to him he didn't feel strong enough to fend her off. He wasn't sure he wanted to.

They embraced just standing there between the car and Jeep on the empty expanse of road, alone. But Stroud didn't feel alone; he felt as if they were being watched. Was this all some sort of elaborate setup? Who was out there, just beyond the reach of his eyes? He could almost hear them--
them
--it seemed to him there were hundreds of eyes trained on him and Pamela as she worked her body into his, nipping at his chest where she'd torn open the shirt.

“God, you drive me crazy,” she told him in a husky voice, the odor of musk rising off her like that of a wild animal. “Can't stand it any longer,” she told him, dropping to her knees and tearing away at his fly.

“Christ, Pam, not here ... not like this,” he protested. How damned horny was she?

He pulled her to her feet, returning her kisses, suggesting they go to his place. She blanched at the idea, saying she couldn't wait a moment longer. She lit into him again and he held tight, troubled, feeling as if she were on something. Again, the faint whispers in the darkness all around them. Was it the wind through the trees?

God, she was taking his clothes off piece by piece.

Whispers ... distinct whispers, as if an audience were watching. Then he wondered about Curtis, Loomis, and Ray Carroll; might they've doubled back to follow him at a distance? Maybe they'd come to a halt when he did, and were now inching closer and closer for the floor--or 
road
--show.

But just then all his questions were answered. He now saw the cause of the whispers and rustling. He saw a bevy of black-winged southern Illinois rodents rising on battling limbs to nearby treetops. It was too dark to see from where they originated, but there were countless numbers of the feeding little beasts fluttering and flapping wildly, romping on the air currents after insects. Bats ... bats fleeing into the night from nowhere. There had to be a nearby cave in those ridges in the distance. He thought of the old song 
The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.

She smothered his mouth with hers, tearing out his tongue with hers, biting it, drawing a taste of blood.

“Rough sex,” she whispered in his ear. “You like it rough? Like me to nip you elsewhere? Want to feel it? Feel it?”

“Pamela,” he said, trying to get control of her.

She dropped from his mouth to his throat and sank her teeth into his neck at the curvature where it met the right shoulder. The pain was instant and yet over as quickly as the intense flash of a camera. And then it was good. She was on him and he wanted her to be on him. She was sucking savagely at the punctures, salivating and making a rubbery-lipped noise as he, passive and blank, lay back under her weight with feelings of intense pleasure and pain, light and dark, good and evil mingling all in one. It was a sexual act like none he'd ever known, violent, shattering, and somewhere deep within his mind Abe Stroud wanted two things: he wanted not to stop her and he wanted her to kill him with her intense desire for him. No one had ever made him feel this way: so wanted, so needed. She made it clear to him that he, and he alone, nourished her need....

Faint ... fainter ... faintest and 
nothing
 with a smile on his lips ... strong, powerful, ex-Marine, ex-cop, she reduced him to nothing, and he welcomed the reduction.

Then everything went black.

It did not need to feed. It had not come to feed, only to watch with the enormous eyes of the wolf from deep within the cover of darkness. It had plenty of nourishment and did not require more. Tonight's hunt was of another kind. Tonight it watched the men in their machines, crisscrossing its territory, coming so close to it that it could look down on them with a sneer, smile, and think of them as future meat grazing upon ground that would belong to it forever.

At one point it grew tired of watching the hunters until it felt a sudden deep sickness from within, a fear that came whenever Stroud was near. It hadn't at first realized that Stroud was with them, but now it knew.

The form of the wolf was replaced quickly by that of the rolling green fog that it created of itself--its essence. It was the essence of decay, the same essence that fed the great many crawling creatures on its own body--the hangers-on. It fed these bloodsuckers with its own supply of blood, was mother and father to them. They'd spawned inside it: ticks, worms, weevils, fleas. The insects reciprocated in a variety of ways, spreading disabling and sometimes mesmerizing diseases to humans which in turn helped it to feed itself. It was as symbiotic a relationship as nature--
or the unnatural
--had ever devised. It had stood the test of time.

White worms that were spawned at the rectus, created of its organs, and a constant reminder of what it was--a being that defied death--also enjoyed being fed when it caught its prey. They then helped in cocooning up the leavings where it hung them in caves.

The one that spawned all such maggots, of course, was the ruler of all darkness, the thing itself--the Andover Devil, Banaker's own creation gone awry, the one part of him that he'd been unable to control.

It toured the night in its cloak of fog, skimming over the earth like a spirit, perching over the Spoon and running its ethereal atoms along its course, ruler of all that it surveyed. It knew of Stroud as the name had been passed through the generations of its forebears as the cause of much calamity. It must see Stroud dead this night, and for this it had come hunting.

When it happened on the puny humans with their guns and landrovers, it hadn't at first felt Stroud's presence. When it did, it was as if it could feel a pounding of several blows to its most vital organ, the heart, kept alive by its unquenchable thirst for blood--the heart revived from death and created from death in this case. Its parentage had been pure-blood vampires, which made it the child of death. Death had made love to death and it was spawned. Now it was here to take from life, to feed on life. But Stroud worried it where it waited in the dark. Stroud made it fear for its own existence.

It had raced from Stroud's party, not wishing to force an encounter, knowing that Stroud was strong and that he possessed magical means and capabilities that could penetrate its otherwise impenetrable strength. Why not leave Stroud to Banaker? To Banaker and to the lovely Pamela Carr?

But even if it left Stroud to this certain end, it wanted to watch. So it had perched high in a tree to do exactly this. The fog of its being had coalesced into the winged creature that was larger than any bat ever depicted by human naturalists or human imagination. And so it hung there, suspended, sightless. The eyes of the minions living upon it searched the night as it searched with its echo-location equipment.

It became confused when Pamela took Stroud in her embrace, for its side to side sonar received the message back that she'd broken off her attack! It located Stroud on the ground and she doubled over on the road. It was confused. They should be locked in Stroud's death throes together, she taking his essence into her. But something unforeseen had occurred. Stroud had worked some magician's trick to dislodge her from the hold she had on him and he was now crawling away from her, wounded but still very much alive, his body in roiling spasms.

It waited, sent out more echoes. She was, it could tell, aware of its presence but unsure just which of her kith and kin was watching.

It held on, patient, waiting ... waiting ... fearful of interference at this time for more reason than who Stroud was.

Then it began to receive images, movement down there on the road to Stroud Manse. Patience, it told itself, patience of demons.

-13-

When Stroud awoke, he was in the ditch beside the road, facedown, rough, sawing blades of grass cutting at him, a cold chill in his bones and a feeling of aloneness in his heart. But he heard and felt the patter of many living things around him, from insects in the undergrowth to screeching birds awakened and taking flight. Rushing life in disarray, flapping in all directions, including the skies: 
the bats?

He moaned with the internal weakness he felt. It was as if he'd gone consecutive days and nights without sleep or rest, so drained was he. It was as if he'd given back to back transfusions.

He sensed he was alone in the ditch, left for dead. He tried to turn himself over but his arms and legs were twisted and gnarled. At the same time, he didn't have any goddamned strength in his limbs.

With force of will rather than muscle, he rocked himself in the high grass until he turned, his legs cascading open like budding flowers. His hands hurt, his fingers were pinched and crossed. He'd been hit by his infamous seizure while Pamela was making love to him.

“Damn ... oh, God ... no,” he moaned. The bite to the neck, the sudden vampire attack she made upon him ... all a sick vision brought on by his own lunatic mind.

But when he opened his eyes she was there, 
standing
 over him, not kneeling, and her tone was like that of a truck driver.

“Goddamn you ... you bastard ... what sort of disease do you have? Is it contagious? Well, is it? You might've warned me! Do you have AIDS, Stroud? Do you, damn it? Oh, my Lord ... my blood's contaminated, isn't it?”

“No, Pam, I don't have AIDS, and you can quit worrying about your blue blood. Will you help me up, please?”

“You went ... you went crazy. Look at the bruises you brought up on me.” She showed him her elbow and knee where they'd been scraped. “I thought you were going to hurt me.”

“More likely to hurt myself in such a seizure.”

“Seizure? Is it ... you know ... a hereditary thing?”

The question made him think of the mad Ezeekial Stroud and of his recent discoveries about his Grandfather Ananias as well. “I think, Pamela, we'd better call it a night. Don't know about you, but I ... I kinda lost the mood.”