Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) (19 page)

Martin Magaffey raced out after the man but he was gone, swallowed up by the dark of midnight. It was uncanny how he'd disappeared so thoroughly, as Magaffey had a view of the street that was completely clear of obstruction. The only thing he saw and heard was the faint shadow of a flying rodent! A bat! Magaffey hated the things, and for good reason. This particular one squealed a faint stuttering cry before it dashed itself through some unseeable crack in the fabric of the city's skyline. The thought of an Andover bat in his own attic made him shiver.

He returned to his offices and almost stepped on the paper that'd flown from the desk. He picked it up and read Cooper's shaky handwriting:

By the time you read this I'll be gone. Nothing matters to me anymore, not here, not without Ronnie. The bones were dug up for the marrow. The marrow is needed to make Banaker's bloody drink.

The bones, the missing marrow ... Magaffey rushed to his file on the tests he'd run and the conclusions he had come to on the bones. He'd hidden the copy of the results before the theft of the bones and his original paperwork. In some bizarre way, things were beginning to take on a strange shape. It harkened back to the time when Ananias Stroud was alive. It terrified old Martin Magaffey. Not so much did he fear for himself as for Andover and the valley and beyond; he feared for his own eternal soul, and he feared for those of countless others.

* * * *

Fatigue had overcome Magaffey when Abraham Stroud found him asleep in the drawing room surrounded by the Ashyers who looked as though they were at a wake.

“You're home, sir!” said Ashyer, causing Magaffey to stir in fitful sleep.

Stroud could almost hear Magaffey's dream; he certainly sensed the man's stark, lurid hatred of himself.

Stroud silenced Ashyer with a finger to his lips, staring at Magaffey, trying desperately to understand the strange, troubled black doctor.

Then he began to see images as if playing on a screen in his mind. Somehow he was in telepathic agreement with Magaffey's torment.

In the fitful sleep there on the chair, images of the past flooded into his and Magaffey's mind like water. Was it the house at work again, the ghosts? Had they somehow learned to use Stroud's distorted brain to send messages through from beyond?

For a brief time he and Magaffey were one. Magaffey's awful dream was his awful dream, and for the first time he understood Magaffey.

Maybe he'd chosen to forget, to look the other way, not daring to confront the truth before now. But what good did it do in his sleep? And how was he to tell the younger Stroud that he, Magaffey, was at least partially responsible for the death of his grandfather?

Maybe if he'd been stronger in the past, tougher, maybe the calamities of this year would not have occurred ... maybe. He thought of the injection he'd given Ananias Stroud on his death bed, an injection meant to relax him, allow him to rest and rebuild his considerable strength. But the drug had only served to weaken him and destroy what defense he had left against the creature then stalking him, a creature bent on the elder Stroud's destruction.

They'd found Stroud outside at the riverbank, his body lifeless, the marks of evil on his throat. The door to the enormous estate had been flung open, and a trail where the victim had been literally dragged from his bed and dumped onto the hoar frost to be bled to death was clearly visible. Not so much as a drop of blood had remained in his body. Yet, there was no blood in the house, none on the stairs, none around the body. But Magaffey had told no one of his autopsy findings, writing out the cause of death as natural.

At the time, given the conditions, he'd thought it best, even if it was cowardly. What else could he have done?

Lonnie Wilson had overnight become a lunatic, a stark, raving, madman. Ananias Stroud had, with the help of Ashyer, gotten Lonnie to Stroud's dungeon where the poor devil was lashed to a restraining table and imprisoned.

Magaffey had been on hand the night they'd returned from their final battle with the devil. They'd returned in the battered, sputtering helicopter with its twisted metal frame and broken glass. Old Stroud was already bitten at the throat by the monster. Magaffey--agitated, weak, and drained--had given Stroud the sedative against his wishes. He'd thrown Magaffey out, shouting foul words and calling him a traitor at the door. It was the last time Magaffey had seen his friend alive. He had looked remarkably robust and very like his grandson, despite the white hair, spectacles, and slight stoop.

Magaffey was trying to understand all the fragmented pieces of the puzzle, trying to once again recall all that Ananias Stroud had said about vampires when he suddenly awoke with a start, his eyes going directly to Abraham Stroud. Their eyes locked and it was as though the old man knew that Stroud had been rummaging about in his mind.

“You're very like your grandfather, you know,” he said to Stroud.

Stroud remained skeptical about the old man. As for the man's nightmare--just images and items in a troubled mind. And yet he did believe that this old man standing before him actually felt guilty at having had a hand in his grandfather's death.

The Ashyers looked on like a pair of worried parents, their eyes going between the two learned doctors who seemed to be caught in a staring match.

“Your neck, Doctor Stroud!” said Mrs. Ashyer suddenly on seeing the swollen report of Pamela Carr's bite. Mrs. Ashyer went white with the discovery. Ashyer stepped closer, inspecting the wound as his wife rushed out for bandages and water. Magaffey, too, was aghast at the sight.

“It's nothing,” said Stroud, still staring into Magaffey's eyes, still rummaging about his brain for answers. “Only a scratch.”

“Scratch, hell!” said Magaffey. “It's a wound, son, like the Meyers boy's wound. How did you come by it?”

“I don't recall,” he lied. “Some insect or parasite I picked up in the woods,” he continued, holding out the white worm in his palm as proof. Any other explanation would sound too much like madness, he believed. “Must've picked it up when we were hunting.”

Ashyer was shaken at the sight of the worm. Mrs. Ashyer dropped the warm water bowl she'd brought in.

“What is this?” asked Stroud. “It's only a goddamned parasite of some sort.”

“These people have some idea where it came from, Stroud,” said Magaffey. “And so do I.”

Stroud held it under the light, scrutinizing it more closely. It looked like a man's thumb, as it was fat on his blood. The skin-colored creature was without eyes, moving in a mindless, sightless world of its own. It's mouth was the business end for it looked like some sort of sucker, like the vacuum of a lamprey, the eel that attaches itself to a fish and drains it of its blood, only to move on to a new host.

Stroud thought the three of them were behaving like guilty criminals under the lights of an interrogation room. He was about to ask what the creature meant to them when he felt the heat of the worm as it suddenly exploded into fire in his hand under the light. He instinctively sent the miniature fireball across the room, shaking off the burn to his hand, shouting, “Damn it!”

Ashyer rushed to where the fiery worm had landed and stomped it out of existence.

“We have much to talk about,” said Magaffey to the stunned Dr. Abraham Stroud. Mrs. Ashyer wiped away at his neck wound, cleaning it of encrusted blood. The indents of two holes stared back at her like eyes out of the past.

“Yes, we have a great deal to talk about, Doctor Magaffey.”

“I'll make us some more tea and coffee,” said Mrs. Ashyer.

“Look now at the wound on your throat, Stroud,” said Magaffey, “and tell me ... where have you seen that kind of wound before?”

Stroud went to the mirror across the room and stared at the cleaned wound. He flashed on Timmy Meyers and recalled Magaffey's peculiar method of dealing with the boy's illness. The similarity between the two wounds was undeniable. It was nearing three in the morning, but there would be no sleep tonight. Tonight, there were just too many questions that must be answered.

Magaffey told Stroud all that he had told the Ashyers about the Bradley body and Cooper's visit to him, and the unusual elixir that Cooper had left him to scrutinize under his microscope. But Stroud was anxious to hear about his grandfather from Magaffey, and as Magaffey began the history lesson, the gaps were filled in by the Ashyers who, as it turned out, knew much more than Stroud had had any notion of.

Magaffey began with the night Ananias Stroud died and, reluctantly, the part that he had played in his demise.

“He was too far up in years to have been about that night. He had held out a hope that you, Abe ... that you'd one day return to become a part of the fight. He said that he sent you repeated messages to come.”

Stroud swallowed the rich black coffee in his throat. He recalled the succession of letters, but he had been too ill and self-involved at the time to seriously consider returning to Stroud Manse. Besides, there'd been no sense of urgency in the letters, only a request here and there to see him again. “I did not know the nature of his need,” he said simply.

“For years he spoke of the fiend out there,” said Magaffey, pointing toward the window.

“Called it a vampire,” said Mrs. Ashyer.

“He claimed it had offspring, progeny everywhere,” said Magaffey. “I listened to most of it politely that night as I ministered to the old man's wounds. I'd humored him up to this point, but here were actual wounds that he and Lonnie Wilson had returned with. He had several of these ... these white parasitic worms crawling about his neck as well, Stroud. Gruesome sight. He insisted on, capturing them and putting them in a preservative for later study. I ... I don't know what's become of them.”

“Where had they gone that night?”

“To the caves.”

“The caves?”

“Along an embankment on the Spoon at Three Forks Road, he said. He said it was the monster's lair. Of course, I believed he was quite out of his mind, and so, without further consultation, I ... I administered a sedative ... to get him under control, you see.”

“The helicopter was ample evidence he was telling the truth, Doctor,” said Ashyer, interrupting.

Mrs. Ashyer added, “Lonnie was the pilot.”

Stroud wondered how much of this he was expected to believe.

“The helicopter hasn't been touched since that night, sir, if you would care to inspect it,” said Ashyer.

“Bank on it, I will. But for now, Doctor Magaffey, tell me all that you know about my grandfather. Was he insane?”

“Insane?” shouted Ashyer. “Your grandfather was a wise man, our protector! And with him gone...”

“He came to symbolize hope for the Ashyers, the only one who might counter the fiend that had once victimized Mr. and Mrs. Ashyer here,” said Magaffey.

“We have him to thank for our lives,” said Mrs. Ashyer. “We were with him for thirteen years, and when he died, we feared staying on here, certain that we would be the next to die.”

“Ananias brought us back,” said Ashyer mysteriously.

“Brought you back?”

“From the dead.”

“From the dead?”

“Literally,” said Mrs. Ashyer.

“It seemed to Doctor Magaffey cruel, even inhuman what your grandfather did to us, but it was necessary to make us feel again, to awaken us from the coma that the monster had induced in us. Your grandfather found us in the grip of slow death, and he brought us back,” explained Ashyer. “He did so with the mechanisms in that torture chamber of his. He shocked us back into life.”

“We were on the brink of death,” his wife continued. “He somehow found us in the caves ... he and Lonnie brought us back here and saved us. After he knew we'd be okay, he called in Doctor Magaffey for us. Later that same night, he went back for others, and that's when he and Lonnie encountered the creature and Doctor Magaffey was called in for medical assistance to your...”

“The chamber? The instruments of torture, you all know ... you've seen these?”

“After that night, the Ashyers told me their story, and they showed me the circular room. In this room he administered what the Ashyers have come to call a 'healing pain.'“

“He brought us around to our senses!”

“It was the most beneficial balm he might have given, don't you see?” asked Mrs. Ashyer. “We were without sensation. We were comatose, yet we were aware of ourselves. The jolt of suffering and torment he induced was necessary in order to revive us! The same as you slap a newborn or pump water from a drowning man!”

“The venom of the creature acts very much like the stunning poison of a snake,” said Ashyer, “to lull the victim into a state of unfeeling and uncaring in which there can be no struggle. The victim is rendered helpless to fight back.”

Stroud thought of his encounter with Pamela Carr once more, his blackout and her subsequent anger. She must have taken his fit as evidence he was immune to her bite. Could it be? Or was he going mad? “I don't know what to think anymore,” he said, standing and pacing.

“Think well of Ananias, son. He was a good man,” cautioned Magaffey.

“His intentions were of the highest, sir.”

“Road to hell is paved with good intentions,” replied Abe.

“Damn it, son!” shouted Magaffey. “Don't you see, he had to use perverse methods--chains, straps, electric shock--anything to wake these people from the sleep of death? Hell, boy, they were found in 
cocoons
.”

“Cocoons?”

“Cocooned up in a thick spider's web of silky wax that this thing creates somehow.”

“He had to cut us free, fly our bodies back here, and wake us from the dead,” said Mrs. Ashyer.

“Sada and Jacob, here, owe their very lives to your grandfather,” said Magaffey, going to him, pleading. “He removed them from the monster's grasp both physically and mentally. I know of no other man who could have so intervened with such courage, using his hands in such a 
reversal
 of goodness in order to keep these people from walking straight back to the caves and into the monster's grasp. Who else would have gone after them? Who else would have restrained them with straps? Beat them? Cut them? Shocked them?”