Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (2 page)

Then they started north.

It was the sort of early April afternoon that can throw a line into summer, with pockets of dirty snow still melting in the hollows but the day suddenly hot and thick, the world seeming to hold its breath as dark gray clouds mass in the west, an errant July thunderstorm, arriving three months too early. The air inside the Volvo was stuffy; it smelled of cherry cough drops. Before they’d even made it out of town, Ally began to feel carsick. Her stomach gave a queasy swing with every turn. She started to count upward by sevens, a calming exercise a stranger had taught her once, during a cross-country bus trip, when Ally was heading back east from Reno. She’d been working as a barmaid in a second-tier casino: another lost job, another failed relationship, another aborted attempt to make a life. This had
been almost a decade ago, and Ally remembered how ancient the stranger on the bus had seemed, so ill used and depleted, though the woman couldn’t have been much older than Ally was now. Seven, fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight . . . Ally was at eighty-four when Stan glanced back from the front seat, asking if she minded music. Ally shook her head, shut her eyes, feeling abruptly tired, almost drugged. A moment later, a Beatles song began to play: “Hey Jude.” She was asleep before the first chorus, dropping into a tropical dream, to match the oddly tropical weather. Ally was on a sailboat in the Caribbean, where she’d never been, and Mrs. Henderson, her high school gym teacher, was trying to teach her how to tie nautical knots, with mounting impatience—mounting urgency, too—because a storm was rising, seemingly out of nowhere; one moment the sky was clear, the sea calm and sun-splashed, and the next, rain was sweeping across the deck, the boat pitching, the wind seeming to rage through the rigging, sounding tormented, howling, shrieking, a pure cry of animal pain, so loud that Mrs. Henderson had to shout to be heard, and Ally couldn’t follow her instructions, which meant they were doomed—Ally somehow understood this, that if she couldn’t learn the necessary knots, the boat would surely founder. She awakened as the first wave broke over the deck, opening her eyes to a changed world, her dream panic still gripping her. Rain was running down the car’s windows, blurring the view beyond the glass, the trees seeming too close to the road (murky, animate, swaying in the storm’s onslaught), the car swaying, too, rocking and thumping over the deep ruts of a narrow lane—no, not a lane, a driveway—and now the trees were parting before them and the Volvo was splashing through one final pothole, deeper and wider than the others, moatlike, the car almost bottoming out before emerging into a clearing, a large irregularly shaped circle of muddy grass, on the far side of which stood a tall, narrow house. The house looked gray in the rain and fading light, though somehow Ally could
tell it was really white. The movement of the surrounding trees lent the house a sense of motion, too; the structure seemed to rock in counterpoint to the plunging branches. Beyond the house, Ally could just make out a small barn. Beyond the barn, a steep—almost sheer—pine-covered hill rose abruptly skyward. Stan put the car in park and turned off the engine, and for a long moment the three of them just sat there, waiting for the rain to slacken enough so that they might dash across the lawn and enter the house. Ally could hear “Hey Jude” still playing, though there was something odd about it now—the speed was off, the pitch, too. It took her a handful of seconds to realize that it wasn’t the CD; it was Eleanor softly singing in the front seat, her voice as high as a child’s and so out of tune that it sounded intentional, as if the old woman might have been mocking the Beatles’ lyrics.

Remember to let her under your skin . . .

This was Ally’s nadir, what would be the lowest dip of her spirits for a long time to come. She realized she didn’t know these people, not really—not at all—and that no one she actually did know had any idea where she was; even
she
didn’t know where she was, just Vermont, northern Vermont, somewhere east of Burlington, in the rain, at the base of a hill that looked too steep to climb . . . yes, she’d made a terrible mistake. She thought briefly of fleeing, pushing open the Volvo’s door and darting off into the storm, beneath the swaying trees, through the mud and wind. She could make her way back down the drive to whatever road might lay at its end; she could put her hope in the prospect of a passing car, a stranger’s kindness. She’d hitch a ride to the nearest town, where she’d make a collect call to . . . whom, exactly? Ally was picturing her ex-roommate and her ex-boyfriend, the two lovers just sitting down to an early dinner in Springfield, the phone starting to ring, one of them rising, reaching to pick up the receiver—Ally felt her face flush at the thought, the shame she’d feel as she announced herself, as she extended her hand
for their assistance, their pity—and at that precise moment the rain stopped. It didn’t slacken or abate; it just ceased—the wind did, too. The world seemed so silent in the storm’s wake that Ally experienced the sudden quiet as its own sort of noise, loud and unsettling. Stan shifted in his seat, turned to look at Eleanor. “Well, love,” he said. “Shall we?”

“Is Reba staying for supper?”

Stan glanced at Ally in the rearview mirror, gave her a smile of playful complicity; it was growing familiar now, this smile—a cherub peeking out from behind a rose-tinted cloud. “What do you think, Reba? Would you like to stay for supper?”

And as easily as that, everything was okay again. The idea of fleeing through the trees seemed suddenly absurd; it was already being forgotten. Ally smiled back at the old man, smiled and nodded: “Yes, Stan,” she said. “That would be lovely.”

W
hen Eleanor’s condition first began to reveal itself, Stan had moved their bedroom to the house’s first floor. They rarely ventured upstairs anymore. This meant that Ally would have free run of the entire second story. The evening of her arrival, after a dinner of hot dogs and potato salad, Ally climbed a steep flight of stairs to discover three bedrooms and a large bathroom awaiting her. She hesitated at the first doorway she came to . . .
This one?
Beyond the threshold was a canopied bed, a mahogany bureau and matching night table, a red-and-white rag rug to complement the red-and-white-striped curtains. Ally heard a creaking sound behind her, and when she turned, she saw her footprints in the dust on the floor—not just her footprints, but paw prints, too, a complicated skein of them trailing up and down the hallway. And then, in the shadows at the far end of the corridor, peering toward her—so big that Ally initially mistook it for a bear—she glimpsed an immense black dog. Ally felt a surge of heat pass through her body: an
adrenaline dump. For an instant, she was so frightened that it was difficult to breathe. She could hear the dog audibly sniffing, taking in her scent. Without making a conscious decision to do so, Ally began to retreat, first one slow step, then another. When she reached the head of the stairs, she turned and scampered quickly back down to the first floor.

Stan was still in the kitchen, wiping the counter with a sponge. He turned at her approach, greeted her with one of his cherub’s smiles.

“There’s a dog upstairs,” Ally said.

Stan nodded. “That would be Bo. I hope you’re not allergic?”

“No. I was just . . . I didn’t realize there was a dog in the house.”

“Ah, of course not—I should’ve introduced you. So sorry, my dear. Did he startle you?”

Before Ally could answer, she sensed movement behind her, very close. Bo had followed her downstairs. He pressed his big head against Ally’s right buttock, sniffing again. Ally jumped, let out a yelp, and the dog scrambled backward, nearly losing his footing on the slippery kitchen tiles. Once more, Ally felt herself go hot—this time from embarrassment rather than terror. Up close, there was nothing at all frightening about the animal. Like his aged master and mistress, he was clearly tottering through his final stretch here on earth. His eyes had a gray sheen to them, and his joints seemed so stiff that even his massive size came across as a handicap. There was Great Dane in him, maybe some St. Bernard, too, but Ally’s original perception remained dominant: what Bo resembled most was an ailing, elderly black bear.

“Blind and deaf,” Stan said. “If I had any mercy, I’d put him out to pasture. But he has such a good effect on Eleanor. It will be hard to lose him.”

“He was here by himself? While you were in Boston?”

Stan dismissed Ally’s concern with a flick of his hand. “The
doctor comes twice a day when we’re gone. Lets him out. Makes sure he has food and water. Bo doesn’t require much more than that.”

“The doctor?”

“Eleanor’s physician. Dr. Thornton. You’ll meet him soon enough.”

Eleanor’s voice came warbling toward them from the rear of the house, as if by speaking her name, Stan had summoned her: “Ed . . . ?”

Stan reached out, patted Ally’s arm. “Duty calls.” He tossed the sponge into the sink, then turned and started from the room.

“Eddie . . . ?”

“Coming, love!”

Ally clicked off the kitchen light, made her way back upstairs, the dog trailing closely behind her, panting from the effort of the climb. A quick tour of the three available bedrooms convinced Ally that there was nothing to distinguish one above the others, and so, after a trip to the bathroom (she peed, and when she flushed the toilet, it sounded like a malfunctioning jet engine, a high-pitched hydraulic shriek that seemed to shake the entire house), she returned to the first room she’d glimpsed, with its red-and-white curtains: it felt marginally more familiar. Bo had followed her up and down the corridor, standing just beyond each successive threshold as Ally examined the bedrooms, and now, when she tried to shut the door to what she was already thinking of as
her
room, the dog shuffled forward and pushed it back open with his nose. His head was the size and shape of a basketball; his thick black fur had traces of silver in it. His eyes were as large as a cow’s and slightly protuberant. Ally had to remind herself that he couldn’t see with them, because there was something so alert about the animal—alert and observant. He stood there, front paws inside the room, back paws in the corridor, not watching, not listening, but somehow obviously appraising her.

Ally realized with a lurch that her suitcases and her cardboard box were still in the Volvo’s trunk. She was feeling far too worn out
to contemplate unraveling the tangled knot of their retrieval—the trip back downstairs, the hunt for a flashlight to guide her across the dark expanse of muddy lawn, the possibility of finding the Volvo locked, of needing to rouse Stan to ask for his assistance—so she took the path of least resistance. She removed her clothes and climbed beneath the musty-smelling sheets.
In the morning
, she told herself:
everything will be resolved in the morning
. Then she turned out the light.

For such a large and enfeebled animal, Bo could move with surprising stealth. Ally didn’t hear him approach from the doorway; she just felt the bed shudder as he bumped against it. At first she assumed this was an accident, that he’d simply stumbled against the bed as he blindly crossed the room, but then the mattress kept swaying, the frame making a soft creaking sound, and gradually Ally had to concede that something intentional was happening in the darkness, though she couldn’t guess what it might be. The bed’s persistent rocking began to assume an oddly sexual overtone. It roused a memory for Ally, of her one attempt at hitchhiking: what had appeared to be a perfectly harmless old man had picked her up outside of Los Angeles as she was heading north toward her ill-fated interlude in Reno. She’d fallen asleep a few miles beyond Bakersfield, then awakened sometime later, in the dark of a highway rest stop, slumped against the car’s passenger-side door with the old man pressed against her, thrusting rhythmically. He was still fully clothed, but she could feel his erection, the eager, animal-like insistence of it, prodding at her hip. The old man’s face was only inches away from hers, his eyes clenched shut, his mouth gaping; his breath smelled sharply of bacon. Ally fumbled for the door handle, spilled out of the car, ran off across the parking lot—it all came back to her now, even the smell of bacon—and she pictured Bo attempting a similar assault, clambering on top of her, his thick paws pressing her shoulders to the mattress, pinning her in place, his penis emerging
in its bright red sheath . . . she rolled to her right, turned on the bedside lamp, leapt from beneath the sheets.

Poor Bo. He just wanted to climb onto the bed, but he was apparently too ponderous, too aged to manage the feat. He’d lift his left front paw, rest it on the edge of the mattress, then give a feeble sort of jump and try to place the right one beside it, but each time he did this, the left paw would lose its hold and he’d thump back to the floor. He kept repeating the maneuver, without either progress or apparent discouragement: this was what had caused the bed to rock in such a suggestive manner. Ally edged toward him, bent to help haul his heavy body up onto the mattress. Her inclination was to shift rooms—if the dog wanted to sleep on this bed, she’d happily surrender it to him—but then it occurred to her that it might be her company Bo desired. If she changed rooms, it seemed possible that the dog might follow her. She watched him settle onto the mattress, his head coming to rest with an audible sigh on one of the pillows. It was a double bed; there was more than enough room for Ally on the opposite side. So that was where she went: she slid under the sheet and comforter, then reached again to turn out the light.

Darkness.

The mattress tilted in the dog’s direction, weighed down by his bulk. Ally could sense herself sliding toward him. She felt the heat of his body against her bare shoulder, and then, a moment later, his fur: coarse as a man’s beard. His breathing had a strange rhythm, a sequence that started with a small intake of air, followed by a slightly larger one, then an even larger one still, and finally a deep inhalation that seemed to double the size of the dog’s already prodigious body. A dramatic, wheezing exhalation would come at the end of this, filling the entire room for an instant with the meaty stench of Bo’s breath. Then the dog would start all over again, right back at the beginning.