Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (42 page)

The man moaned.

August applied more pressure to the joint lock. “I will snap your goddamned wrist,” he said.

“August,” the man said.

“How do you know my name, huh? Did he”—he flicked his head toward Tony’s body—“tell you before you cut out his fucking heart?”

“August,” the man said.

“Do not say my name,” August said. “Who are you? Why did you kill my father?”

“August,” the man said, “it’s me.”

Though his voice was hoarse with pain, some note in the man’s
words caused August to stare at his face more intently. Both the man’s long beard and ponytail were white, and his nose looked to have been broken at least once, but August recognized Tony looking up at him—albeit, a Tony from twenty, twenty-five years in the future. The room around him appeared to shimmer, but August retained his grip on the man’s wrist. He stole a glance at the dead man. As surely as he could tell from where he was standing, it was Tony lying there. August looked at the man who had choked him. The resemblance was uncanny. “Who are you?” he said.

“It’s me, Tony,” the man said.

“Sorry,” August said, “you’re about two decades too old for the part. Try again.” He pressed the man’s wrist.

The man grimaced. Voice tight, he said, “The last big fight your mother and I had—the two of you had moved. I came down for the weekend to see if we couldn’t work things out. We couldn’t. She told me she was going ahead with the divorce. I accused her of lying to me, of leading me on. She was standing at one end of the dining room table. I was near the front door. You ran out of your bedroom, which was on the other side of the kitchen. How long you had been listening, I’m not sure. You were in your short pajamas. Your face was red; you were crying. You screamed at the two of us to stop it, which I guess we did. Afterward, I came to see you in your bedroom before I left. You were inconsolable. I kept telling you it was nothing to do with you, I just had to go, but you knew better. You knew everything had changed.”

“Jesus.” August released the man’s hand, stepping away from him.

“I know.” The man he could not yet think of as his father struggled to stand. Clothed in a loose gray shirt and black pants, the slight curve in his spine worse, he was thinner than August had ever known him, as thin as he’d been in some of the old photos he’d shown August. His eyes, though—his eyes were the same steel blue.
Rubbing his side where August’s elbow and foot had found it, he said, “I’ve thought about how I would explain all of this to you if I had the chance. There was a quotation I was going to use, from Stevenson,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
: ‘I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens.’ It seemed perfectly applicable to me, but I wasn’t sure if you’d agree on the relevance.”

“Oh my God,” August said, “it is you.” His vision doubled, blurred; he swayed drunkenly. The screaming seemed to be happening inside his head as much as outside it.

Tony’s hands were on his shoulders. “Hey,” his father said, “hey.” August’s mouth opened, but there were too many questions, tripping over one another in their haste to be asked. “I understand,” Tony said. “It’s a lot to absorb. Nor is this the worst of it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Would you come with me so I can show you something?” Tony dropped his hands from August’s shoulders.

“What?”

“It’s better if you see it for yourself.” Already, Tony was backing toward the doorway. “I’m not going to try to hurt you,” he added. “I only did that as a, a . . . precaution. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve been down here a long time.”

“You didn’t recognize me?”

“It took me a moment,” Tony said. “I’m sorry. Come this way.” He spun on his heel and exited the room.

Staying in place was hardly an option. August followed Tony out of the room into darkness and cool, the short distance to the junction of the four passageways. There, Tony turned left. This tunnel sloped steeply down. Whatever faint remnant of the sun’s glow had accompanied August’s initial progress was long gone, despite which, he could discern the general details of the passage, whose walls bore the same weird graffiti he’d observed earlier. In fact, it was these
markings—the Möbius characters, the broken ring, the maze—that were responsible for what illumination there was. They didn’t glow; rather, so black were they that they caused the surrounding darkness to appear lighter, as if they were drawing it into themselves. The air was dry and full of screaming.

“Who is that?” he said.

“Who’s what?”

“Doing all the screaming.”

“Oh. That’s me. And others.”

On the right, the tunnel wall was interrupted by a succession of rough openings, each about five feet high by three wide. Tony stopped at the fourth and ducked into it. Mindful of his head, August went after him.

The space into which they emerged was more cave than proper room. Approximately circular, it was illuminated by a series of holes drilled in the center of its high ceiling, through which beams of phosphorous-white light slanted to the floor. The odor of dust mixed with that of rotten blood. The cave’s circumference was studded with ledges and outcroppings, a dozen of which supported human bodies. As far as August could discern, every one of the figures was in the same condition as the one he’d discovered in the smaller room, the chest wrenched open, the heart taken.

Nor did the resemblance end there. “Come.” Tony waved him to the right, where the nearest corpse lay prostrate. Were Tony not standing in front of him, he would have identified the man dead on the rock shelf as his father. Dressed in worn and bloodied karate pants and a torn white T-shirt, he appeared far closer in age to Tony as August had last seen him than did the white-haired figure watching for his reaction. August cleared his throat and said, “If I checked the other bodies in here, they’d all look like this one, wouldn’t they? Like you.”

“They would.”

“You realize how fucked-up this is.”

Tony frowned. “Language.”

“Seriously?” In spite of the body broken and violated before him, of the ever-increasing horror of the entire situation, August laughed. “Since when did you become such a prude?”

“Since I spent twenty years in here,” Tony said, flinging his hand to take in the cave and what lay beyond it, “in the tower.”

“How is that possible?” August said. “How is any of this?”

His father leaned against the outcropping that held what appeared to be the corpse of his younger self. “This place, the tower, is a prison. Except it’s also the prisoner. Never mind that part. The point is, it contains an extremely dangerous man. To be honest,
dangerous
doesn’t begin to cover it. Nor does
man
, for that matter. The tower houses a monster, and I mean that in the most literal way. It was a man, once, a long, long time ago. Now he’s more shadow than flesh, shadow and thirst. As long as he thirsts, he suffers terribly. Whenever he satisfies his thirst, he earns a respite from his pain.”

“What’s he so thirsty for?”

“Blood—human blood.”

“You make him sound like a—”

“Like a vampire, yes.”

“Fuck,” August said. “No fucking way. I mean—just—fuck.”

This time, Tony did not reproach his cursing. “After everything you’ve seen—after me . . .”

“Jesus, Dad,” August said. “Why—ahh, shit.” He could feel his lip quivering, his eyes growing moist.

“I’ll take the ‘Dad,’ ” Tony said.

The chorus of screaming went on. After a moment, August said, “You were saying.”

“The . . . prisoner can’t leave the tower, so he has to wait for someone like me to come blundering into it. Complicating matters for him, the tower doesn’t remain in one place for any length of time. It shifts,
changes location every few minutes. Based on what I’ve learned, I believe it moves through time as well as space. Though I may be mistaken. Regardless, what this means is, the prisoner’s victims are few and far between. He has to find a way to . . . prolong each one. To this end, he employs a device. It resembles a full-length mirror, but its surface is black. The prisoner positions his victim in front of it, and the mirror splits part of them off. Not an arm or a leg, but a self. One of that multitude of selves Stevenson wrote of, a constituent of the aggregate that is each and every one of us. That new self serves the prisoner’s immediate needs. Once he’s . . . calmer, in better control of himself, he cuts more selves away and sets them loose inside the tower.”

“What for?”

“To hunt them. It’s a form of amusement for him. The original, the prisoner keeps alive for as long as he can, recapturing them when he needs to slice more selves away from them, until the person is little more than a husk. Unless, that is, a new victim wanders in, in which case, he drains the previous one immediately.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“I mean, why not have a couple of food sources available?”

“I’m not certain, but I believe the prisoner is afraid they would find a way to overpower him, destroy him. He’s powerful, but not all-powerful. Together, a dedicated pair of individuals might be able to accomplish what one could not.”

“But what about the copies, the other selves the guy sends off into this place? Isn’t he worried about them ganging up on him?”

“Have you encountered any of them yourself?”

“As a matter of fact, I have. That was what brought me here, actually. He got into the house and killed Orlando. He looked like he was going for Rebecca and Forster next, but I stopped him. He ran, and I chased him here.”

“Orlando’s dead?”

“Yeah.”

“But your stepmom and little brother are okay?”

“Pretty freaked out, but they’re all right.”

“Poor Orlando!” Tony said. “He was such a sweet dog. Not a mean bone in his body, I swear.”

“I don’t know if it’ll make you feel any better, but he was protecting Rebecca and Forster from you—your double.”

“God, how awful for them.”

“They’re okay, really. What about the other selves?”

“Yes, yes. I’m sure you noticed that that version of me was somewhat less articulate.”

“To put it mildly.”

“That tends to be the result of the mirror’s process. Occasionally, one is produced who’s capable of coherent speech, but they’re mad in a different way. In either case, the prisoner doesn’t have anything to worry about from the mirror’s children.”

“Is this what your vampire does when he catches one of them?” August nodded at the corpse.

“No,” his father said, “that was me.”

“You did this?”

“I did all of this.” Tony glanced at the room’s grisly contents. Was the screaming louder in here, more concentrated?

“Jesus Christ.”

“You know how savage the creatures are.”

“I get that,” August said. “Believe me. One of these guys jumps you, you have to do whatever’s necessary. It’s . . .” He waved his hand at the broken ribs fencing the chest cavity, the missing heart. “This seems a little premeditated, you know?”

“It was.” Before August could respond, he said, “I’m trying to starve him.”

“All right,” August said. “I can understand that. Why remove the hearts, though? Does the vampire eat them?”

“No,” Tony said, “I do.”

“What?” August’s stomach lurched. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I read about it. There’s a library in the tower. I was looking for a way out of here, and I thought I might find information about it there. The books on its shelves . . . they’re what you’d expect to find in a monster’s keeping. They’re full of . . . darkness. I found what I was looking for pretty quickly, but I kept reading. It had been so long since I had held an actual book in my hands, turned its pages, let my eyes take in its sentences, its paragraphs. Imagine having been without running water for a month, and then being able to sink into a hot bath. Or picture sitting down to a filet mignon after a year of stale crackers. I luxuriated in the act of reading. When the contents of the pages under my scrutiny became clear, I didn’t credit them. Isn’t that ridiculous? Eventually, I learned that there was something to them.”

“You ate someone’s heart because you read about it in a book?”

“Not someone’s heart,” Tony said, “
my
heart. My heart sectioned and sectioned again, grown coarse with the use. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve faced the black mirror, watched another piece of me step forth from its darkness. Frankly, I’m amazed there’s any of me left. Consuming the heart was supposed to be a way of taking what I’d lost back into myself.”

“Christ,” August said. “You make it sound so reasonable.”

“It isn’t,” Tony said, “not at all. It’s insane and obscene. But so is the tower. And the prisoner.”

“Has it worked?”

“I’m still here.”

“You said you found a way to escape this place.”

“I did. It took me some time to map out the directions to it, but I should be able to get us there fairly quickly. My God, August, how I’ve missed you. How I’ve missed all of you.”

“I—”

“I know. It hasn’t been that long for you. However, we need to start moving, or you’re going to find out how much time it’s possible to spend in here.” Tony pushed himself off the ledge on which he’d been leaning and strode past August, toward the cave entrance.

With a last look at the carnage his father had wrought, August followed. Tony turned right. After the room’s beams of light, the passageway was dim to the point of blackness. August fell into step beside Tony. “The tower,” he said, “the prisoner: do you know where they come from?”

Tony nodded. “I do. I have to tell you, though, that none of this was what I planned to talk to you about. Were we to meet again, I had a list of things to say to you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes. We weren’t going to spend our time on the origins of the tower and its occupant. We were going to discuss . . . important things.”

“Well, it’s a bit late for the sex talk, so you don’t have to worry about that one.”

“Very funny. I assumed your mother and stepfather saw to that.”

“They did. There was a book.”