Authors: Caroline B. Cooney
Evil Returns
The Vampire’s Promise Book Two
Caroline B. Cooney
A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney
“I
DON’T THINK I
want to sleep in the tower after all,” Devnee said to her parents.
“Devnee,” said her father. He was really quite annoyed. “Half the reason we bought the house was because you wanted a bedroom in a tower.”
They had rejected raised ranches, Cape Cods, and bungalows and bought a dark Victorian mansion in desperate need of repair. Mr. Fountain wanted the workshop in the high dry cellar. Mrs. Fountain wanted the glassed-in room to raise flowers. Luke wanted the yard so he could play basketball, baseball, and football.
But Devnee had wanted the tower. How romantic a tower had sounded! Her own castle, her own corner of the sky. She would fling open the windows and a blue sky and a gentle sun would welcome her to a new town. She would curl up on her sleigh bed to read books, and she would brush her hair in front of a mirror with a white wicker frame, and somehow this time, in this town, this year, she would be beautiful and she would be popular and happy.
The tower jutted out of the attic, but was not part of it. It had a separate stair up from the second floor. The tower was round, and its plaster walls were cracked, its windows tightly shuttered.
Shuttered on the inside.
Devnee had never come across shutters on the inside of a house. Their new home had shutters all over the outside—louvered, broken shutters that banged in the wind and creaked in the night. But the tower had another set on the inside, strapped down with black metal, as if the tower had once held prisoners. “We’ll just quick flip open these shutters,” her father had said yesterday afternoon, nudging at the hasps and bolts, “and then the sunlight will stream into your new bedroom, Dev!”
But the armor of the shutters would not come free, and the moving men had been downstairs yelling where did Mr. Fountain want the leather recliner, and he had said he would get to the shutters later.
They had moved her bed into the tower. It was a romantic bed, with its sleigh back and lacy white ruffle, high mattress, and sheets with dark mysterious flowers. They had moved her chest of drawers into the tower. The chest was narrow and had seven drawers; Devnee was not tall enough to see into the top one. She also had a chair, a computer, and a sound system, but they were still sitting in the downstairs hall. There had not been enough time to move them into the tower.
The moving men left.
Her parents and her brother, Luke, were starving and insisted on going into town for something to eat.
Devnee made her first serious mistake. She told them to go without her, and bring her back a hamburger and french fries. She would stay alone in the house, and get to know her new room, and the new smell, and the new feel of life in a different state.
She did not know, last night, how different a state could be.
Luke and her mother and her father chattered steadily as they went to the car. The doors of the car slammed, and the engine of the car growled, and Devnee Fountain was alone in a house with a tower.
Devnee played the game she always played when she was alone. The beautiful game. Where the lovely funny terrific girl on the inside finally had a match on the outside; where Devnee’s hair gleamed, and her smile sparkled, and her personality captivated.
She had left the kitchen. Kitchens were no place to play the beautiful game. Kitchens, like Devnee, were useful and stodgy.
She would go to the tower to be beautiful.
No one knew about the game. Devnee was so dull and plain that people would have laughed at the mere suggestion of beauty, and then smothered the laughter in pity.
She left the kitchen and walked into the large high-ceilinged center hallway, where the wallpaper was stained from the squares of long-gone portraits. She stood on the bottom step of the wide stairs that led to the second floor.
Perhaps this time she would play bride. Or prom queen.
She pretended to fling a mass of shining hair and to widen eyes that stopped boys in their tracks.
Reality taunted Devnee Fountain.
Right,
it said.
You? Beautiful?
I don’t want beauty to be a game! she thought. I want it to be real. I want to be beautiful for real.
A sort of reverse gravity began to pull at Devnee Fountain. The backs of her eyes and the roots of her hair leaned toward the tower. Her fingers crawled up the banister and dragged her arms after them. The stairs disappeared behind her. Her hand stuck to the round glass knob of the door that opened to the tower stair. Her head went up ahead of her, but her feet argued and hung back and tried to turn around. Her eyes leaped forward.
The stairwell breathed. It filled its lungs like a runner after a race. Devnee’s lungs did not fill at all. She caved in. She cried out.
And she climbed on, equal parts wind and weight.
It was darker in the tower than anyplace Devnee had ever been. The dark had textures, some velvet, some satin. The dark shifted positions.
The dark continued to breathe. The breath of the tower lifted her clothing like the flaps of a tent, and snuffled in her ears like falling snow.
It’s the wind coming through the double shutters, Devnee told herself.
But how could wind come through? There were glass windows between the outside and inside shutters.
Or were there?
The windows weren’t just holes in the wall, were they?
What if there was no glass? What if things crawled through those open louvers, crept into the room, blew in with the cold that fingered her hair? What creatures of the night could slither through those slats?
She had not realized how wonderful glass was, how it protected you and kept you inside.
There must be glass, Devnee thought. Something has to stand between me and—and what? What do I think is out there, except the night air?
She knew that something was out there.
She could hear it, crawling on the roof, filtering through the louvers.
Devnee put her hands out to feel the shutters.
In front of her face appeared some other hand. A hand with long fingernails of silver, wrinkled like crushed foil. Fingernails poked toward her, eager and grasping. The hand shifted the dark as if stirring ingredients, and it crossed the room toward Devnee like a growing stalk.
Her own hands rose like vapor. Devnee knew she was going to hold hands with the hand.
Devnee jerked her hands back, and tucked them under her arms for safekeeping, and staggered to the tower door. Stumbling and sick, she half fell, half flew down the tower stairs, down the second-floor stairs, throwing herself into the kitchen just as her brother came in with her bag of food.
“Hungry, huh?” said Luke, tossing it to her.
As she caught the paper bag with its red and gold logo it seemed to her that a second pair of hands also closed around the food: hands with fingernails so yellow and tarnished they were like old teeth in need of brushing.
Who is in this house with me? thought Devnee Fountain. Who lives between those shutters?
“If you’re not going to eat that, I will,” said Luke.
“She’s nervous about her first day in a new school tomorrow,” said their mother affectionately and soothingly. “Everybody to bed now. A good night’s sleep is what we all need, and we’ll worry about the rest of the furniture later on.”
Devnee managed to smile. Her parents did not approve of complaining. They called it “whining” and felt that high school girls like Devnee should not whine.
So Devnee tried not to. “It’s kind of creepy up there,” she said, striving to sound careless and relaxed. “I don’t think I want to sleep in the tower after all.”
Her mother frowned. “It’ll be a darling, darling little room once we have it fixed up. I see it in peach and ivory. It cries out for soft pastel colors.”
It cries out for me, thought Devnee.
“The thing is, Dev, we have to do the kitchen first. That’s our priority. Once we have sinks and cabinets and a shiny new floor, we can think about things like painting the bedrooms.” Her mother smiled, a secret smile, her daydreaming smile. Devnee’s mother daydreamed of things like remodeling. She could hardly wait to go from store to store, studying samples of floor coverings. Her mother would actually say out loud, “Doesn’t it shine?” and “Do you really like this new finish?”
Devnee looked at her family: sturdy father, overgrown weed of a brother, domestic mother. Her father loved television; her brother loved sports; her mother loved cooking.
This was her life. This was the family she had drawn.
How she wished for something more special! People who did not fit into such suburban stereotypes. People with personality and pizzazz. But this was the right family for her; she was just as dull and predictable. Plain brown hair, plain pale face, plain ordinary smile, plain acceptable clothing.
Devnee crumpled the hamburger bag and dropped it in the garbage. She felt crumpled herself, exhausted from the silly beautiful game, the dumb tricks of her imagination, the nonsense of a tower that breathed.
And so Devnee went up to the tower again.
Night went on.
Sleep did not come.
Something damp and gelatinous brushed over her face.
Devnee cried out, and a hand clamped down over her mouth. Not her own hand—some other hand: cold and horny and soft like rotting fruit; as if it would burst and evil would spill out.
Devnee ripped the hand away from her mouth, whirled in the bed, and reached for the light switch on the wall. The blessed shape of the switch; the hard ivory-colored plastic. She flicked it up, and the room turned yellow and bright.
Her heart was beating as fast as a rabbit’s.
Nothing was there. No thickness in the shadows. No movement by the shutters. Nothing damp and nothing rotting soft.
The only hands were her own, clutching the sheet hem as if she were a sailor for Columbus, falling off the edge of the world.
Calm down, Devnee told herself. You’re just worried about the first day of school tomorrow. That’s all. You gave yourself the heebie-jeebies.
For a long time she looked around the room, to see if anything came out of the cracks.
Gradually she relaxed against the pillows.
The room would be fine once the shutters were opened, pretty lacy curtains were hung, a rug put down. Once the plaster was repaired and the walls painted. Yes. She would choose cheery daytime colors and the rug would be thick and cozy-soft under her toes.
Devnee yawned, trying to entice sleep. Then she stretched, trying to get ready to lie back down. At last she folded her hands on her chest, to calm herself. I must look like a corpse laid out, thought Devnee.
She glanced down to see how she looked, and she saw something that could not be.
Her shadow had not folded its hands.
Her shadow was not attached to her.
Her shadow was on the far side of the room, exploring by itself, its black elongated fingers, like the tines of an immense fork, raking silently over door cracks and shutter louvers.
She tried to breathe, but the room itself was breathing so much it sucked up all the air. There was none left for her. She tried to think, but the ancient thoughts of all the people who had ever used the tower were swirling in the air, and she had no thoughts of her own.
Mommy,
she whimpered soundlessly.
Daddy, Luke.
Something came toward her, but it was not Mommy or Daddy or Luke.
“Come here,” Devnee whispered to her shadow.
But it did not come.
If I turn off the light, thought Devnee, that would end my shadow.
